The 360 controller has come to be my favorite (though i have yet to touch the ps3 one), though I would prefer that they flatten the tops of the buttons a bit so they don't hurt my fingers during long play sessions where you might be aggressively pressing them. The dpad gets the job done too, though I do like the playstation style d pad a lot.

The 360 controller's dpad is awful - probably the worst I've ever used. Any 2D game (fighters especially) aren't playable with the default controller due to the dpad. I tried playing Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix with the controller, and I just couldn't do it.

The name is still around, but it's definitely not the same company. See Wikipedia for the full history.

I was really happy when I saw that there will be a box with all of the Fallout 3 content in it later this year. I've been meaning to pick up Fallout 3 for a while not, but just haven't gotten around to it. While I'll have to wait a bit longer, given that I'm essentially getting all of the DLC for free, that's a deal that I can't pass up.

The game's been out for about a month; online multiplayer is a complicated bit of code that has to have been in development for almost the entire length of the project.

Except the game shipped with online multiplayer - you can play through the game co-op with a partner, either locally or online. Surely that code could be reused for this mode - sure, you need to support 4 players instead of 2, but I can't see that being harder than writing the multiplayer code in the first place.

That said, even ignoring the fact of how this was announced, I still don't see the point. Playing deathmatch where you can't shoot and move at the same time sounds like a really, really bad idea.

Except this isn't the resurrection of Sierra. Sierra was part of Vivendi, which is now part of Activision/Blizzard (since Vivendi previously owned Blizzard). As part of the merger, Activision/Blizzard didn't pick up the Ghostbusters game. It's Atari who know owns the rights to publish Ghostbusters.

I'm afraid that the Sierra brand is likely gone for good now - I doubt Activsion/Blizzard has any reason to bring it back at this point.

While I read that too, I went ahead and set up a free account to see what the game was like. I was never asked for my credit card number - I assumed that they changed the sign up policy since they wrote that page on their support site.

They did, but only barely. I recall hearing that shortly before they acquired NEXT that the chief executives were shopping the company around, hoping to get bought out. However no one even wanted to buy them.

Apple of 1985 is very different from the Apple of 2008, however. I would say that Apple is much, much more popular now than it was then. While the Mac probably hasn't gained much marketshare since then, the popularity of the iPod and iPhone have given Apple a pretty solid foundation right now. In the short term, I don't see Apple having any problems, but the real question is if Apple's new leadership would be able to keep this track record going.

* As an outside chance (probably more likely for 2010), one of the major online-distribution retailers will try to impose a console-style mandatory feature set for games sold over the service, standardising control systems and adding features such as achivements.

Steam is actually close to doing this already. If you ignore the games that are repackaged for Steam (games like Bioshock, Fallout 3) but focus only on the made-for-Steam games, they all have achievements (well, those released after Achievements were added to steam around the release of The Orange Box), and you can press Shift+Tab to bring up the Community UI (Friends list, your profile, etc.). At least I've come to expect these features on a Steam game, and miss them when they aren't there.