Hectigo

It's pretty hilarious, actually. From what I've read, the company is practically broke, and now they make their games available online... but only for US residents. There's some money to be made here in Europe too, you know. Well, I guess it's temporary anyway, and common sense dictates that this won't become a trend. If not, I guess I can live without Indigo Prophecy for now. I hope that Valve is at least trying to push their partners into releasing globally, so everyone would have the best possible selection of games available.

I'd usually rather use a separate screwdriver too, but if I had to take 10 different tools with me wherever I go, I'd opt for the Swiss army knife instead of a toolbox. I'm not saying mobile phone control methods can yet directly compete with the PSP or the DS, but with developments like the N81, we're getting there.

I can't exactly see why Nokia decided to continue using the N-Gage name, considering the last iteration ended up a failure, but it'll be interesting to see what this will mean to the mobile game industry. There's little to no reason why games on mobile phones couldn't be as good or even better than on the "dedicated" gaming handhelds, and the additional possibility of online gaming wherever you go is a nice feature to have. There just seems to be a belief about the inferiority of games on mobile phones that feeds on itself, and a standardized, high-quality mobile game platform with strong marketing could be just the thing to fix it. I remember some decent games even on the original N-Gage, so I hope people will eventually forget the side-talkin' fiasco and move on. Why have three or four different devices in my pockets when just one can do the job just fine?

Yep, just like some people pointed out already in the earlier discussion, widescreen users were whining about nothing. If anyone should be whining it would be the 4:3 users, who don't get a letterboxed image or a reduced FOV like they sort of should. Of course it's still an interesting decision to have such a relatively small FOV, but it's the one the developer wanted to have. I guess a possibility for adjusting FOV will still be a welcomed addition, especially for people who might suffer from motion sickness.

Also consider that gamers are mostly young people with higher-than-average skills in English, so the percentages are probably even higher than in the Wikipedia map - probably closer to 90% in many countries. Here in Finland only game manuals are usually translated anyway and games only come with content in the few major European languages, with some Sony games like LocoRoco being a notable exception.

I've been playing mostly Hidden: Source for HL2, plus some Pirates, Vikings and Knights II too (that one is still in the early stages of development, but has an awesome premise :) ). Anyway, I don't think the problem is setting the bar high - it just means we're getting quality stuff, but I'd see it as a positive thing if more teams making highly anticipated mods released early alpha builds instead of trying to release only finished versions. It might even get more potential modders excited for participating in development. And like Phillip mentioned, hiring the best modders is just good motivation for them to be modding in the first place.

If the game is designed with 16:9 as the primary aspect ratio (like all Xbox 360 games most probably are), how is 4:3 supposed to be better, even if you see more stuff? If seeing more would automatically be better, shouldn't all 3D games have the field of view as large as possible, instead of the measly 100-something degrees they give us now. Think of it this way - in 4:3, you just see stuff you're actually not supposed to be seeing from the designer standpoint. Where's the problem for widescreen users? And the image is not stretched out of proportion either way, just "cropped" (overlaid the two pictures in PhotoShop just be 100% sure). I guess most people that buy the game won't even notice the so called problem. Even if 2K released a fix for this, it would probably be cutting down the 4:3, not increasing the FOV on 16:9.

Back here in the good ol' Europe (EU to be specific), recycling old electronics has actually been mandatory for companies for a couple of years. You can drop broken or unused devices off to any electronics store, and the company manufacturing the item is responsible for paying for recycling. It's one of the reasons why everything costs a bit more here than it does in the US, but one can't still see it as a bad thing. I hope we'll hear more about initiatives like this back there too.

FMVs in DS games? Meteos and Metroid Prime Hunters have them at least, Metroid Prime Pinball has a few short ones. Those are the ones I know about, but there might be more. Anyway, it's definitely not a new thing on the DS.