Parappa the Rapper ushered in the music game genre in the late 1990s. But I see your point about new genres being rare over the past couple console generations. Even modern idle games such as Cookie Clicker are streamlined versions of the basic concept behind tycoon games, as can be seen especially with Clicking Bad (that is, Meth Tycoon).

MIDI Maze (known as Faceball 2000 on Nintendo consoles) is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter that preceded even Wolfenstein. Walls could be shot out or switched with floor buttons. The concept of destructible scenery itself dates back to Ice Climber and Super Mario Bros., and combining it with a first-person view was obvious to anyone skilled in the art once 3D GPUs advanced.

Metal Gear, MSX2/NES. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past came close; I was able to stealth my way through the first castle until reaching the basement where I had to slaughter a guard for the key.

Arcade shoot-em-ups adjusted difficulty to player performance long before Left 4 Dead. The platformer Gods did so way back in the early 1990s.

Good luck finding anything moddable on a console, apart from ROM hacks for third- and fourth-generation consoles decades after the games were released.

Or FPS elements blending into the RPG, as in Phantasy Star.

On Nintendo consoles. They go by the name "Animal Crossing".

To be useful for "PC" tasks, a smartphone would need a large monitor (which you mentioned), a Bluetooth keyboard, and an operating system with a multi-window window manager. (The phone itself would sit next to the keyboard and become a trackpad.) It's as if someone made a motorcycle that could pull a trailer, but you end up using the trailer most of the time because you have to carry the tools to do your job to each job site. At that point, you could just buy a car (an Ultrabook laptop) or a truck (a desktop or desktop-replacement laptop).

Hairyfeet has. He shows the HTPC concept to customers in his shop and sells a Bluetooth thumb keyboard + trackball that's about the size of a smartphone's slide-out keyboard. The problem has become one of marketing the solution to people who happen to live outside Hairyfeet's sales area.

I see new console games for $10-$20 in the bargain bin of Walmart. I also see used console games around that price or less in used game stores once the demand for a particular title dies down or the successor console comes out. That's not even counting chains like Disc Replay that specialize in third through sixth generation consoles.

I thought PlayStation Store already offered paid downloads of full-size games. And as the hard drive gradually became a standard feature on Xbox 360 consoles, Xbox Live Arcade has gradually increased its size limit to where XBLA games such as Red Johnson's Chronicles take up more than half a DVD layer. I guess the remaining problem is that XBLA games have to be vetted by disc game publishers.

Some people, on the other hand, know full well how much their candy bar and caffeine habit costs because they have the patience to sit down and write a budget. That's why I switched to buying ZonePerfect candy bars in multi-packs and switched to diet soda (caffeine) from a prescription NRI (atomoxetine). Perhaps Apple, Google, and the like need to add easy-to-find ways to track in-app purchase usage of each app over time the way Android 4 "Jelly Bean" tracks data usage of each app over time.

Provided Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony will let them. It's especially hard for someone just breaking into the industry to go the startup route, as Robert Pelloni demonstrated with Bob's Game.

But sometimes a specialized application might not need gate density. For example, RetroZone (retrousb.com) is about to release an NES-compatible video game console with HDMI output. This FPGA contains a slightly modified* 1.8 MHz 6502 CPU, a VDP compatible with the NES PPU but modified for digital RGB output, and a PSG compatible with the one in the NES CPU.

* The NES's variant of the 6502 lacks binary-coded decimal arithmetic. Games instead use either software BCD math or convert binary to decimal when printing.

God is all-powerful, but that doesn't mean he likes to waste power. God is good, even if giving humankind what we need doesn't necessarily include giving us everything we might want.

One who intends to hand stewardship of all non-Homo species over to Homo, as in Genesis 9:2-3. What John Godfrey Saxe wrote about laws and sausages applies equally well to sapient apex species.

I agree, and I have a hypothesis about that. God reveals what we need to know to serve him, and as of right now, we don't need to worry ourselves with the other class-M planets that he's running.

HBO Go does, and I'm told even some of the basic cable networks do as well.

To encourage people to subscribe to a participating cable or satellite TV provider that pays a royalty per subscriber for the network's bundle of channels.

Yeah, I'm with you. I believe in day-age creationism, that the "days" of Genesis 1 correspond to periods up to billions of years. The Bible makes it clear in 2 Peter 3:8 that time periods from God's point of view aren't necessarily literal, and before the emergence of Homo on the sixth creative day, God's was the only point of view. Even English has idioms like "the good old days" and "back in the day". This and God's use of evolution as a tool show no big conflict between Genesis and the fossil record.

God's own son wasn't especially white. The Bible makes it clear that he looked like a typical Galilean Jew; otherwise, he would have found it a lot harder to mix with crowds.

So what do you do when the network's own website confronts you with "Please log in with the username and password provided by your cable or satellite provider"?