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Some slightly related from Technorati and Google.

[Bootlace.co.uk] Welcome to BootLace.co.uk: When you aim at the mainstream you find yourself targetting a more casual gamer that is likely to be less skilled (through lack of practice as much as anything), and as such traditional games will generally be punishing them. This obviously isn't the best way to encourage a purchase, so to remove this problem games are made substantially easier, which in turn reduces any challenge for a good player, thus allienating another potential audience (albeit a minority one). (As a note: I think this is why auto skill balancing systems never really work, essentially you get rewarded for bad play, and penalised for good play). Obviously the solution is to fix the underlying design principles, and to produce games where players aren't punished for bad play, progression should always be possible, but for good play to be rewarded in a meaningful and satisfying fashion.

[Cpe000103c34069-cm014300001653.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com] Ben's Beta Blog: Metroid Zero Mission was released on 2004-02-10 (though apparently that was a day late - bah, I'm not quibbling). This game is a so-called retelling of the first Metroid game, not a remake: gameplay differs significantly, there are far more powerups, and the game starts off much more linearly. The ROM dump hit the internet a full two weeks before the game hit stores; it's eight megabytes, like Fusion, and full of hidden niftiness. the remakes and reinterpretations of the original music are nothing short of fantastic, and the sound effects are effective and subtle, pleasantly evocative of the originals.

 [Tamspalm.blogspot.com] Tam Hanna's Palm OS Blog: March 2005: Right now, Palm is sticking with Garnet (an updated form of OS5, on all recedently released devices that run OS5, such as the Treo 650, and the T5), because they are not ready to change, and more importantly, because we are not ready to change. When they do eventually move to Cobalt, it will in a way alienate alot of the hardcore Palm users, and we will, no doubt, continue to use our old, innovation happy, Garnet and OS5 devices. Depending on how good the Cobalt devices are, we may buy them anyway, but knowing how Palm tends to stick with low to mid-end devices, this may never be the case. We can only hope that someone like Tapwave may devise a completely innovative device.

[Mauricem.blog.com] MauriceM's Blog of stuff: "This result is not only perverse public policy – placing the rights of patent holders above the rights of doctors to perform medical diagnosis and discuss a natural biological relationship – but it also violates patent law, which mandates that only processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter are eligible for patent protection," states PUBPAT's position statement titled, Supreme Court Should Protect Medical Facts and the Right of Doctors to Use and Discuss Them From Patents.  "The public, including specifically those wishing to use and learn from laws of biology, is significantly harmed by a failure to maintain the limits on patent eligibility because patents can – and often do – prevent important medical treatment and scientific research." 

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Gadgets, Gadgetism.org