Cultural value?

I like my Retrogames.

I don't care if some of them might offend some people, if they have Michael Jackson* prancing around rescuing llttle boys, the Twin Towers being blown to smithereens or anything else potentially 'offensive'. They're a part of our heritage and changing anything about them would be wrong.

I'm not for one second going to say Tweenies has any value at all on the same level, but it's not as if it's some horrific footage of Jimmy Saville abusing anybody.

If the BBC are out to cut, re-edit or erase from history each and every reference to the man isn't that more likely to do greater damage than is solves, culling entire episodes from libraries, trying to rewrite history? Isn't that what we need protections against, not some 'offensive' scene.

* I am aware that he wasn't convinced of anything, but people had serious doubts at one point.

Not a Microsoft fan...

but I hope Microsoft take Apache to the cleaners in this case. An option, provided and set to a default for the benefit of the customers is being specifically ignored.

This is targeted at, and directly harms the reputation of IE, open and shut case I'd say.

Hot Air Balloon

Just give the guy a hot air balloon and be done with it, maybe a Zeppelin? ;-)

Once he's over international waters he can bail and Ecuador can pick him up ;-)

Simply seeing jets scrambled to stop a big balloon would be worth it alone.

'Windows 8 Interface?

Can I be foolishly optimistic and hope it means this turd of an interface has already been dropped from Windows 9?

Yeah, might look out for this one on discount.

This is a good example of why the 2nd hand market needs to exist.

It looks like it could be fun, but not £50 worth of fun, maybe £15, it has no real long term value, no reel 'keep factor'. The above poster is bang on, inFamous 2 feels like a far better value product thanks to the in depth editor and greater possibilities.

I'm sure it's just another game which Activision, EA and the like will point to in an effort to show how 2nd hand sales are killing their market, but the simple truth is it isn't worth the asking price, very few games are. In this case I don't think it's even worth the asking price after being reimbursed by a trade it so I will be waiting until it can be picked up sub £20 and if I can't find it at that price point, I won't be buying it.

That's not to say it's a bad game, the review and rating seem fair from what I've seen of it but things need to be priced more realistically.

The REAL problem

Why are people trading in their single player games so early to create this market in the first place.

I still have the majority of my SNES and Megadrive games, why? because they're timeless. I can play them over and over again, they have lasting gameplay value on reliable systems which have outlived numerous failing 360s, PS3s, and Dreamcasts.

360 and PS3 games with the same long-term appeal are rare, I have one or two which I'd never consider trading in, but that's it.

The problem with most AAA games if that they don't have this appeal, they're shallow games propped up by a bunch of pointless extra achievements and downloadable content in an attempt to keep you playing. Once I've played them through they get traded because I'd have no real desire to play through them again, and probably won't have a working 360 in a few years from now once they're out of production and all failed; look how quickly Microsoft dropped the original XBOX. Furthermore I don't really consider them worth the price I paid for them and the trade in money subsidizes that. If the trade-in option wasn't available I wouldn't have paid the 'new' price.

Current games are a short term fix, like a drug, not long term investments, and this is even more true of the downloadable content.. Due to this, I don't value them as long term investments, and trade them in.

Braben should be looking at the cause of the problem, not trying to treat the symptoms with an axe. I find his comments ironic when you consider that Elite and Frontier are two of the most timeless games around.

Off to Linux...

This was forced on the 360, no good there, tremendous waste of screen space, gimmicky and full of ads and not much fun to navigate.

I've tried it on the desktop and if anything it's even worse. Couldn't quite believe my eyes.

Unity at least is optional, I can download a distro without it and know it will be supported in the future. By comparison sticking with Windows 7 only grants you so much mileage, and the path away from a traditional desktop has been chosen.

My main reason for having a Windows desktop was games, but I haven't purchased a game for a long time thanks to the utter garbage DRM systems a lot of new games come with and in that time I've come to realise I'm not actually running anything which requires Windows anymore. The drive for everything to be web applications accessible on multiple platforms has made the choice of desktop OS almost irrelevant beyond the core interface / file management functionality, something which W8 gets very wrong by making it more awkward than ever for power users.

What compelling reasons remain to stick with Windows next time I switch OS? I've never used anything else but I no longer see the point, even the familiarity aspect has been stripped out with these changes. Not trolling here, genuine question.

Urgh

Echoing the thoughts of others, this is taking the P I double S.

Syndicate, the original summed up a generation, it was a complex RTS game combined with business management elements. The game complex but well tuned beast which rewarded the player for thinking, had a great number of original aspects and merged everything into a thrilling, timeless experience which is still fun to this day.

Syndicate, this version sums up this generation. A generic FPS with nothing to offer which nobody will remember.

Creating something of the scale, complexity and balance found in the games of old seems beyond the developers of today.

20-25% is the highest rating I'd give this, it's worse than DNF which was at least true to it's roots.

Real laws..

Hardware should be required to ship with a functional, free open source OS by default.

Commercial operating systems (including Windows) should be an optional purchase, to be installed by the user. (Insert CD, install away, not hard)

This should apply to Computers, Tablets, Phones etc.

The bundling and shady deals need to stop. The majority of people don't even need Windows, but are forced to pay for it because there are no other realistic options..

Clauses like the one Microsoft are trying to enforce on device manufacturers should be illegal.

Another legal one...

Gaelco (Spanish arcade developer) also made their game 'World Rally' freely available from their official site

http://www.gaelco.com/english/pages/hablando/frhablan.htm

They actually worked on this hand-in-hand with MAME developers Manuel Abadia and Elsemi to ensure it got properly emulated. Probably also doesn't work in iMAME but if there are droid ports of newer versions you should be able to run it legally on those :-)

New port of Old version

This is actually a port of Mame4All, based off Mame 0.37b8 which was released around October 2000.

That's 11 years ago, this is a really retro version of MAME. It's actually the same one that got ported to the GP2X and other mobile platforms, it requires less power to run than newer versions, but has a far smaller support library and inferior support for many games, with a great number of hacks added to get things up to speed on older mobile platforms at the expense of correct emulation. Don't expect it to be running your Street Fighter 3, Boogie Wings or Ketsui because it won't, even the emulation of classics like Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands leaves a lot to be desired in such an old version.