hmmm

As far as the Half-Life 2 requirement, I believe that you can actually get by without it - just Portal should work fine. I understand that they used a couple assets from Half-Life 2, including a vehicle in one room, and that these are included in the map pack itself but, to be sure they are covered on the legal side, they ask that you own that game as well. It will install and play without it, however, and I honestly don't see why Valve would care that a vehicle or a couple items are being taken from their other game.

It's true from all I've read that this is the worst port imaginable, down to every detail of interface, but it's not true that it cannot be done correctly - try out SCUMM for the DS and play through some classic point and click games; the interface is perfect, with one zoomed-in screen smoothly following the stylus, etc. If only the people behind all the commercial ports on the market were half as attentive to detail as the homebrewers. sigh.

I have to disagree with this 'updated controls' thing. If you change the controls, you change the game. Goldeneye was created for a controller with one (bigger) analog stick, with 'context sensitive' changes in function. Read about the development of the game - they wanted to blend two types of gameplay together, the first being a simple move+strafe kind of FPS and the second being fixed games such as Virtua Cop, where you have a changing scene and simply need to decide quickly what to shoot. That's what happens when you enter a room in Goldeneye - you see one guy running for the alarm, while another turns his weapon on you, etc; you hold the R button to switch into aiming mode and then quickly pick off the opponents in a strategic order before returning to walk/move mode.

That dynamic is not a limitation that needs to be overcome in a remake - it's part of the unique gameplay. Rare was a very clever company back then, and they figured out how to make the first fully realized console FPS that anyone could pick up and enjoy. Dual analog is not a perfect control scheme, and in fact the current blind assumption that there can be no other way to play is one of causes of the stagnation of the FPS genre today, IMO.

Reminds me of the review for a little album called Shark Sandwich.

I'm not surprised by your stupidity - a comment like this one was bound to show up.

This is why the PSP has so few enjoyable games compared to the DS: handheld gaming is a completely different platform from home consoles, and trying to directly copy the action from a console game will never produce an enjoyable portable experience. Thankfully the Ghostbusters devs have at least avoided that fallacy - whether the game will succeed or not will wait to be seen.

It is already possible to play Mario Paint on the DS with full touchscreen support, thanks to the genius of homebrew; I was just doing this a couple days ago. But yes, it would also be great, perhaps even better, to put it on the VC with Wii remote support.

I guess the oldest system I keep and use has to be my 4 GBAs. Why four, and why do I need to keep them indefinitely? A little thing called 4 Swords Adventures. I'll never be able to get rid of them, for I'll never tire of the rare occasions when I'm able to convince some friends to humor me and go for a little multiplayer Zelda action. Normally social/drinking gatherings go for something with a less complicated setup, which is why its so rare that we get it out. Pac Man Vs is a more accessible party hit it seems.

Aw man, mine certainly had no hard drive. It did have two 5 1/4" drives. I still managed to enjoy some fantastic games - my personal favorite being the AD&D game Pool of Radiance. What a massive world for such disks! Well, it did use like 12 of them as I recall...

Wait I'm confused; your mother hates stylesheets?

Hm, looks like they're finally at least attempting to address what certain karaoke lovers such as myself see as the crippling flaw in Singstar games: the fact that they used the original recordings, meaning you usually could not turn off the artist's vocals. From an interview:

"We did keep searching for another solution to the problem. For SingStar on PS3, we've found a pretty good technological solution which can reduce the artist vocals for the majority of songs."

"There are some songs which don't work with the technology because of the way the song was mixed in the recording studio, but overall, it's really good."

That's progress I suppose. Still, any track on which the vocals cannot be completely removed is useless as far as I'm concerned, so hopefully that 'majority of songs' is overwhelming.