OpnickC

LAST MINUTE ENTRY!

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2010/09/13/3ds_mt_framework_detailed/

^ Capcom is using the Resident Evil 5 engine, with all graphical effects turned on, on the 3DS. You know, RE5, the game which Capcom said the Wii couldn't even handle the main menu of. Joystiq themselves said Resident Evil Revelations looked closer to RE5 than RE4.

So, the 3DS basically has graphics on par with the 360.

Yeah, I don't think the 3DS is going to age as poorly as you think. . .

@Frozen Pizza

360 controllers (the wired ones, anyway) are standard USB. So PC gamers can use this, although I'm not sure if any competitive game would be better served by it.

There are definitely some games that are better served by a good gamepad (now I'm going to get flamed. . . ), so this could be a good buy even for PC-only gamers.

1 month after Half Life 2: Episode 3.

I like money.

SecuROM = No Sale.

Publishers need to pull their heads out of their asses and stop throwing away sales. And Valve needs to stop allowing 3rd party DRM in the steam store.

Joe -

I've seen the original Half Life engine referred to as "GoldSrc" (Gold Source?). If HL1 was "gold source" and HL2 was "source", Source 3 would make sense.

As long as it will run well on my brand new rig, I don't mind a new engine. :-)

That said, Half Life 2/the source engine has aged extremely gracefully the past 6 years. If the game came out today, it's graphics would at worst be called "mediocre". I'm not sure whether to be impressed with valve, dissatisfied with the rest of the development community, or happy that I didn't need to spend money on a new system until now (I'd been running my desktop since 2004, with only a single RAM and graphics card upgrade). ;-)

Anyway, a new engine from valve with tesselation, dx11, and opengl/linux support would be quite a pleasant surprise indeed. Looking forward to hearing about it!

The way Valve has been going, it's probably Left 4 Dead 3.

@JW To answer your question, the vaio does it by costing about twice as much.

Also, I wouldn't call an nvidia 335m, 6.5hour battery, wireless n, and even an inscribed nameplate "no features". Sure, no-one in their right mind wouldn't get the RAM upped to 4gb, but you're still getting a reasonable price.

For perspective, a lot of specialty gaming laptop companies (such as Sager/Clevo resellers) only give you 2gb RAM default. Heck, even the $1200 Macbook Pro only has a 160gb HDD and 2gb RAM (of course, that's comparing Apples to, well, you get the idea).