I think the point of the people who wants realism is this:

In the past, games were harder, were in fact 'Nintendo Hard'. If you beat one of those games, you have all the rights to brag about it online, in real life, everywhere. You still have these bragging rights for old school Nintendo games.

Nowadays, games are far easier, with elastic AI (think NFS Underground) and if they are hard enough then people complain and never play again (as it happened with Sniper Elite).

However, people still brag about beating these easy games. So, I conjecture that what the 'realistic' party wants is a game where you have to earn your bragging rights.

So far there are very good examples of this. iRacing is a racing game/service where if you are number one you totally deserve at least to test drive the real thing. And you need a lot of hours dedicated to the game to be able to achieve this. Bragging rights totally deserved.

I think this Sniper Elite game also counts for that, in a far lesser scale. You have to aim higher at long range because the bullet travels downward, and it takes some time for it to reach the target. It's more difficult than snipers in other games, so if you get a really long distance kill you can post a video of it in youtube and receive kudos for it. Also: getting shot really hurts. You do everything you can to avoid getting shot, in fact you do everything you can to avoid been seen, there is no running towards the armed enemies trying to be a faster gun. This last point is what the article is about. Some dude beating the Batman game using Batman fists and getting shot in the face all the time.

In the end, I think this is why all games should have difficulty settings. In fact most of them do!

You play on easy if you want to escape reality for a while and relax.

You play on hard if you want 'realistic' bragging-rights-deserving gameplay.

Hey, this whole article is a non-issue.

FYI: these kind of battles still happen in Colombia: the army v.s. the FARC.

I just need to talk to anyone who was drafted in the army to hear such stories.

The writer of the article calls for better game violence.

If you can't respawn in another round, you can't call such software a game.

In fact, by your definition, there's no way any software can satisfy those two criteria, being a game, and being realistic, ever.

The writer of the article calls for better game violence.

Realistic or not, any software with that feature can't be called a game any more.

What's modern about that?

Pyramids didn't built themselves, you know.

In particular I do need Blizzard and iRacing games.

I also prefer Opera to Firefox.

That's just from the tip of my tongue, I guess there's more proprietary software that me and the company I work for needs.

Yours are totally fair points.

My personal criteria to define a particular cell phone as a smartphone is the existence of a publicly available SDK.

It is an arbitrary criteria because I exclude J2ME from the 'SDK' definition, but you can argue either way.

In this sense I'm sure that all cell phones will be smartphones in a couple years.

I have just seen that the article was written by the guys who wrote this toolkit.

So feel free to mod my other post as redundant.

I need to at least RTFS.

I can't say I do agree with you, but I don't disagree either. I think that this is one of the premises that only time can tell.

There's a C++ Web framework to test your premise with a high profile web project:

http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt

I really hope somebody uses it for something facebook-big and we hear about it.

Well, 'reto' meaning challenge in Spanish means rectum in Portuguese. :)

Just testing a word in Spanish you recently learned?

We say esse-kuh-elle.

No ass anywhere in that word.

Do you play with a gamepad or with a steering wheel with pedals and stick?

Denny Hamlin did win after training with a video game by papyrus:

http://www.gamespy.com/pc/nascar-racing-2003-season/712182p1.html

The programmer of papyrus is the same guy behind the new iRacing simulator.

However, I do agree that GT is not good enough compared with iRacing or the papyrus games.

No, but iRacing is an adequate sim for learning it.

You just need a Logitech G27 racing wheel.

It is actually a very expensive version of rFactor.

You can buy rFactor from here: http://www.rfactor.net/

IndyCar and Nascar drivers use http://www.iracing.com/

You can play both in your PC, not in a playstation.