Let me guess: That was prior to the proliferation of controller-friendly PC titles that followed the release of Steam Big Picture. These games use bigger fonts because they know the player will be sitting farther away, and they include presets for the Xbox 360 controller and maybe even some popular HID joysticks.

You answered your own question: the PC isn't already in the living room. If you keep a console next to the TV, there's no need to shut down the PC, unplug cables, carry it from the computer desk to the TV, and plug in cables, and then do the reverse once gaming is done. Or were you referring to buying one PC for the living room and one PC for the computer desk?

I bet what spire3661 meant was "indie" as in companies formed by industry alumni, not real indie as in companies formed by people who happen not to have had a chance to move the whole family to an industry hotbed. There's a difference, as you pointed out a year ago.

But I'm still glad that Sony Computer Entertainment has taken a step away from the console makers' fallacy and toward the model of allowing review sites and free demos to speak for a game's quality, even if it may have taken competition from Apple's App Store, Google Play, and the forthcoming Ouya console to get SCE to do it. Microsoft, which appeared the most progressive of the seventh generation with XNA, appears to have fallen behind in the eighth by continuing to require indie developers to partner with an established disc game publisher to get a "slot".

I don't own an iOS device quite yet. Have controls in platformers for iOS become as responsive as controls in platformers for even the almost 30-year-old NES? Is it even possible to make a responsive virtual gamepad on a flat sheet of glass? Or are platformers themselves passé?

I thought sending SIGINT to modern GUI programs would just cause them to copy the selected text to the Clipboard.

Playing music while you work is multitasking, and it depends on operating system-dependent audio drivers. Or can iTunes for Mac OS X seamlessly hand off to iTunes for Windows yet?

The low-def consoles (NES through PS1/N64) and the standard-def consoles (Dreamcast, PS2, original Xbox, and GameCube/Wii) attach to any monitor with a composite video input. A Commodore 1902A or AppleColor composite monitor makes even NES and Super NES games look razor sharp. And the high-def consoles attach to any monitor with an HDMI input. It's PCs that have been historically video output limited; VGA was pushing out EDTV, and XGA was pushing out HDTV, when very few living-room-sized monitors accepted anything higher than SDTV until around 2007 when LCD HDTV monitors finally pushed CRT SDTV monitors out of Best Buy and Walmart.

Whether a gamepad is clumsier than a mouse depends on the genre. RTS and single-player or online FPS I'll give you; mouse + keyboard beats a gamepad for those. But how would you have played Super Mario Bros. or Castlevania or Mega Man with a mouse? Even for games that work well with a keyboard, it's hard for two players who live in the same one-PC household to share a keyboard. One console and one copy of the game is cheaper than four PCs.

Because of ease of use. For one thing, consoles usually don't have to deal with antivirus. Nor do console gamers have to futz around with installing a video card and updating drivers. Also because consoles get exclusive games, and often entire exclusive genres, such as platformers and fighters. And this is in turn because not all games benefit from a separate computer and monitor per player, and apart from hairyfeet and his disciples, nobody wants to connect a PC to a TV.

Unless you work in an area whose cost of living is so much higher than the cost of living 50 miles away that an hour's car commute each way is a profitable way to exploit such a gradient in cost of living. Or unless the loop detectors that control the traffic signals between where you live and where you work don't respond to 2-wheeled vehicles. I've seen a few intersections in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that don't respond to a bicycle and a motorcycle put together. Or unless you don't have other cyclists to show you how to dress for and ride in a thunderstorm or in snowy conditions. Or unless the motorists turn out not to know how to share the road with a cyclist.

The iPhone is. The iPod touch isn't.

iPhone 5 is to iPod touch as Galaxy S4 is to what?

I want to pay for a device. But I want to pay for the features of the hardware that I plan to use, not for the features of the hardware that I do not plan to use. The pricing of an unlocked iPhone vs. an iPod touch shows that a device with a cellular radio costs approximately twice as much as a device with no cellular radio. Because I don't plan to use a cellular radio, I don't feel I should have to pay for a cellular radio. But right now, it appears all 4" class devices sold in stores come with either iOS or a cellular radio or both. Why do only three people want no iOS and no cellular radio?