Zorak

I just beat this game today. It's easily better than NSMB and a lot harder. It's true that it resorts to being difficult through some cheap, trial and error gameplay a little too often, but it rewards with quite a few lengthy levels and bonus content like time trials, etc. The original is a great game, and this doesn't stray too far from it, but it has just enough to set it apart as a great game in its own right, especially for a handheld. If you're on the fence, you should get this game.

Hm. I don't know who this guy is, and he seems like a jerkass, but he's at least partly right. No matter how much you point to Katamari Damacy, there still is an undeniable creative stagnation in the industry, and it would be helped by a better business model or different distribution method. You can see them same thing in every big money entertainment industry - music, movies, television, and video games. Creativity is not rewarded as it should be because the risks are too great.
"Is it the responsibility of publisher to advance the medium through risk taking?" I would argue that, to a certain extent, yes, it is their responsibility. It's also good business sense - standing pat in an industry so geared towards young people is a recipe for disaster. Subsidizing riskier propositions with the profits of surer-bets is a good way to grow provided that the publishers have a keen eye for what will succeed amongst the high risk titles - something few publishers have proven so far.
The consumer's great hope is that digital distribution will cut out the middle man and reward the talent directly, but we're still a long way from that happening in the console realm. That could be one of the most interesting and underdiscussed aspects of the next-gen wars: who will embrace digital distribution to the fullest and quite possibly provide us with both the most quantity and quality in games?

I don't understand this at all. It shouldn't be any kind of technical challenge at all to implement the rumble, right? Why on earth would this be? It couldn't cost more money to add it in, could it? Can someone please explain this to me?

Halo as The Aeneid - I thought for sure that Vlad had posted this one.

Nothing is more frustrating than watching and, in some games, rewatching a cutscene that you want to skip but can't. Equally frustrating is accidentally skipping an integral cutscene and being left to wonder what the hell you do next. I've long maintained that it should illegal - punishable by death, possibly torture then death - for developers not to allow the optional skipping and replaying of cutscenes.

I don't think that the nature of the "picture it" series has been questioned so much as its quality. A commenter in a previous "picture it" put it best:

"9. What makes the "Indexed" blog great is the insight encapsulated in the charts. You read it and go, "That's an interesting way of looking at things". These are just dumb statements of well-known facts. :("

Vlad, you don't need to explain the point of the series or do them less frequently - you just need to do a better job.

Which one of these subsets is for the 'rational gamer?'

OtakuCODE - That's not true at all. I would venture to say that the opposite is true: no one would laugh at a stereotype that is not 'effective in terms of discrimination.'

curiouser? stuntage? Polly Shore's reading of Alice in Wonderland?

Cage - The Bears' defense is better than the Chargers', and it's not just that the Raiders lost - it's how they lost. They looked terrible. Let me put it this way: Al Davis, Art Shell, and Aaron Brooks are the three biggest decision makers for your team. Uh oh.