Jasen

Will they have intra-lance communications to help with fog of war? Scout mechs used to direct fire - or provide visibility of enemies for assault mechs is an important part of the game.

Warning: Standing near turret may result in accidental empathy suppression.

I don't want my empathy suppressed!

@maxxorz A bit, but not really. One of the big critiques of the iPhone has been lack of Flash. If MS is coming out with a better phone OS, where's their Flash?
I think this points to how early in the life-cycle this announcement is. Ballmer said they welcome Flash, so maybe Adobe hasn't been given a phone and SDK to develop with yet.

MS has their own Flash competitor, Silverlight, no mention of that, either.

So no application or game partners? EA?
Maybe it's just too early, but it seems weak when they list a bunch of OEMs and carrier partners but no software developers.

@OneWhoTweets Agree. AT&T is complaining about the iPhone users hogging bandwidth, yet Win7 phone looks like it needs a fat clean pipe to the cloud.

(A few of the comments sound a bit "astro-turfy" to me.)

I'm glad to see MS imposing some hardware and UI consistency. Notice that they keep hedging that with allowing flexibility and innovation. Not sure how to read that - there will be consistency across the platform, or OEMs will fracture the platform into unusability.

Parade of suits. Zzzz....

I have it. It's not too bad, but aimed at younger players - say 8 - 12. As mentioned, gameplay is fairly simple. But it is a pretty game with a fun aesthetic. I agree with the complaint that there aren't enough save points. It's not a game you can pick up, play for 15-30 min. and move on. You HAVE to dedicate 45-60 min to slogging through a level to make progress. I bought the game to play with my 6 yr old daughter. But you have to earn multi-player levels. So we've been playing the same two levels over and over again, or she watches while I slog through a level hoping to earn more levels we can play together.

It's worth a rental. If you play for 5-10 hours you'll have a solid feel for the style & mechanics of the gameplay.

Best Buy had it for $40 last week. And "more" for $30. I picked up the first one. Not too bad so far.

Isn't that like calling all first person shooters the same game? Run, point gun at enemy, pull trigger, repeat.

Five variations on racket based games doesn't sound too bad. And Motion Plus use is a good thing.

For $12 I pulled the trigger. I still have Okami I haven't played yet that I picked up for cheap, too.