Somehow this seems a little irrelevant, considering the boon of gaming on mobile phones and an economy that makes people think twice of buying a separate portable gaming system.

Um... the linked blog post links to an official document that was first posted in March of this year.

I guess this means we can officially say goodbye to Microsoft Surface. Kinect is comparatively inexpensive and can now be used on a customizable platform.

Yes, I know this and I read the whole site too. But in most cases, the positives outweigh the negatives. Things like color bleeding and soft pictures that obscure the detail in backgrounds are far worse than noticeable dithering.

No, the problem is there's no such thing as "perfect" emulation. The same way music from phonographs won't be exactly the same when they're converted to MP3s, by definition emulation will never be the same as the real thing. From differences in how the game is emulated, to using different controllers or different display technology, there is no perfect emulation. It can come close though, and in that respect emulation has succeeded.

If you want perfection, use the real games and the actual hardware, preferably with an RGB mod and a CRT display: http://www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/index.html

To play rare or impossible to find titles, just download the ROMs and use something like this to play it on the actual hardware: http://krikzz.com/severdrive.html

But if you want portability and don't care about accuracy, you go with emulation.

Length is a pretty dumb metric for value in video games any way. I find that games these days take many hours to complete, but there's little to no desire to going through them again. Dumb things like unlockables and achievements artificially add replay value, but don't make the game any more fun to play multiple times.

I think the success of games like Angry Birds are showing developers that they don't need to make an overbudget game that takes 20 hours to complete. Even games that can be played through in an hour or less can have great longevity on multiple playthroughs. Look at the Cave shooters - deep scoring systems and challenging mechanics keep players coming back for more. And linearity and repetition have nothing to do with it either - every game (even real life sports) has both, what's important is that the game is fun to play over and over.

So he's consulting the EFF (not working as a consultant for them like someone else though). I'd be very disappointed at the EFF if they side with this guy. He installed software that most of the passerbys didn't know about. The software was used to take pictures of them, most of whom did not give their explicit permission. And he published the pictures on an Internet site for the whole world to see. Given how the EFF takes the bigs to task for their written license agreements and violations of privacy, taking this guy's side would make no sense.

Too bad hardware acceleration didn't make the cut yet. It was available in a test build though. I'm looking forward to their implementation of hardware acceleration - it uses OpenGL instead of Direct2D on Windows. I've had all kind of problems with Direct2D (namely, it doesn't seem to accelerate much of anything - not even supposedly basic stuff like scrolling).

I hardly think his album would have been in trouble had that single song not made the cut. As worst, they would have had to remove the track from the album. He went through a similar situation with James Blunt's "You're Beautiful." In the end, the song ("You're Pitiful") didn't make the album but Weird Al released it for free download on his website.

If you haven't the time to watch the video (or maybe you're using elinks or something), they specifically cite the fact that police in Travis County, Texas have willingly supplied checkpoint data to Trapster developers.

And anyway, I don't see how these apps would help people avoid DUI checkpoints. If you're sufficiently wasted, then you probably don't have the judgment skills to use the app and avoid the checkpoint in the first place.

Posted too soon. Pepper's Adventures in Time is also good. And it's freely downloadable: http://www.markseibert.com/the_full_game.htm

It has a girl as the protagonist and there's some good (if twisted) history lessons there too. Cute stuff.

If you're looking for a good old school point-and-click adventure game, I highly recommend hunting down a copy of Torin's Passage: http://www.allowe.com/Torin/index.htm

Lowe designed the game so he could play it with his daughter - he's most famous for working on the baudy Leisure Suit Larry titles. That having been said, there's some sly humor there that only adults will understand. But at heart, it's a fun family game - there's even a hint system so little kids don't get too frustrated with it.

The Windows version never worked well even on Windows 95, but the DOS version should run perfectly in DosBox.