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Video games should only be played by true professionals, there is just such a high level of danger involved.
Just look at this list of injuries:
dizziness, altered vision, muscle twitches, loss of awareness, disorientation, motion sickness, Eye Strain, Back Injury, Photosensitive Seizures, hand-arm vibration syndrome, blisters, friction burns, lacerations, carpal-tunnel, "Nintendo Thumb", bruises, electric shock, the many horrors of DDR, and now heart attacks.
In the wrong hands video game consoles, and computers running video games are death machines!

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=55 873

Well, at least it is promised for XBox in here.

Sorry I don't know how to make the link clickable

Use HTML.

Example: <a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/file_service_files. php">http://www.eurogamer.net/file_service_files.p hp</a>
Result: http://www.eurogamer.net/file_service_files.php

"Square generally does inject originality into each installment of the Final Fantasy series"
Exactly in the same fashion that Nintendo. If you say that, then you haven't played any Nintendo game lately. Saying that the games are the same because they are the same franchise maybe is true for another developers, not for Nintendo (a common uneducated guess).

"What Nintendo has, basically, promised at this point are rehashes."
I think that I've never seen (nor you) a rehash that is controlled with a touch panel and two screens. Go play hte SAME games that you have in PSP in the same form that you have played before in your PS2 and come back to tell us about rehashes.

"...another Mario Kart game (a series which hasn't really changed since the SNES games)"
You don't know anything about Mario Kart, or Nintendo. Stop pretending. What about dual pilot karts? What about two player controlled karts? Name another game that has that.

"Then again, I don't blame Nintendo, really. Super Mario Sunshine tried some new things with the Mario series, and that game was greeted with overwhelming antipathy from a public that seemed, basically, to want a clone of Mario 64"
I think that you don't catch the picture. Nintendo fans were expecting a revolution , not an evolution and therefore the dissapointment. The new promises a revolution in the series.
You are thinking with the typical mainstream Sony mind and thinking that others are the same.

I like Square and Sony like everyone under the sun, but you should speak with knowledge.

Hmmm, with Microsoft recently shelving their sports lineup for 2004 and EA Sports games allegedly coming over to Xbox Live

How does the game industry get away with crap like this? A better question is: how does the gaming press let the gaming industry get away with crap like this? I get as annoyed with the mainstream media as much as anyone (I'm an avid Daily Show fan, which I suppose is now as mainstream as anything but that's another post). But if, say, the film industry tried to pull a stunt like this, the mainstream media would've dogpiled on the company that did it.

So where's the gaming media? Ohhhh, they're too busy jacking off to screenshots . The gaming industry needs to grow some gonads, with the exception of that French guy who stood up and walked out, no doubt his massive balls dragging on the floor as he exited. I'm not asking for an over-reaction of politically-correct-ness. I want people to say controversial things. But this isn't controversial in content or idealogy. It's no less than someone pissing on the ruins of the WTC, but pissing on the ruins only because someone promised him $5 if he did it, not because he had anything to say about the WTC or had any idea of what it meant. Someone clueless about 9-11 and pissing on the WTC for $5, or having a press conference at Chernobyl to promote a game are the same thing.

Something like that might be actually worthy of attention, if the purpose was some form of punk anarchistic expression, or the thought behind it was something like, "I'm going to show how worthless this is." But this whole STALKER thing, and all the Vietnam and WWII games that have suddenly grown out of game developers' asses; it's a bunch of morons sitting in an office thinking, "Hey, what can we do to make more money?' It's some boob for a PR rep who sat in his office and brainstormed on a white board on how to better sell the game. The meaning of these places and events have become lost to these people. Vietnam games, WWII games, promoting STALKER in Chernobyl; they're not controversial expressions, they're accidental Whiteboard Nihilism.

It was dropped by the orignal publisher, but was picked up earlier this year. Todays Eurogamer says March.

It's funny that you should mention this... 3dfx's last card (the Voodoo 5 6000 which never ended up making it's way into the consumer channels) did EXACTLY this. It required that you plug it into the wall via it's own external power cable. Not even hooking it up to your power supply was enough at that point (which the Voodoo 5 5500 and some modern cards require).

And for those of you not in the know, nVidia of course bought out 3dfx. And shortly thereafter (6-12 months I'd say), nVidia's products really did seem to start inheriting the flaws of that later generation of Voodoo's that helped to kill off 3dfx. Things like excess heat, power consumption, and the reliance on brute force (namely adding more and more transistors, the cause of the extra heat and power consumption) rather than the genius ingenuity it seemed they had previously relied on.

So don't be surprised when the next nVidia card DOES need a direct line to the wall plug.

I think it's especially telling that ATI's top card right now, the 9800XT, is still using a .15micron process, while nVidia is on their third gen of .13micron cards (5800; 5900; and now 5700, 5950) and yet can barely (in some cases -can't-) compete with ATI. ATI now has .13micron experience under their belt as well, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before their 9800XT's get a pretty nice clock speed boost as they move to .13micron - which could certainly spell trouble for nVidia :/

I should note that I do own stock in nVidia. And while I'm doing well with it, I honestly think they're going to have to pull off something miraculous next spring if they want to get ahead of ATI in terms of performance. Just my two cents. Or so.

After three hours in Enter The Matrix's company, we're quietly confident that Shiny has come up with a flexible and intuitive combat system that will save it from being yet another movie tie-in disaster. It's clear that it's not absolutely perfect in several respects, but kudos to all concerned for going to so much effort to provide one of the best movie-game experiences we've seen.

http://www.eurogamer.net/content/p_kotor_x

You are clearly very lucky, having only ever been involved with honest people in the industry. It is a fact, at least in the UK, that magazines grant high review scores to games in return for "exclusive" coverage.

The real question is who cares what happens to Gamespot? They give any old crap an 8 or above. Look hard and you can find some good reviews online: at joystick101, gamecritics, or eurogamer. And they're all free.

I'd read that at one point that they were going to have two versions of the game: a black box and a white box. The white box would be $5 more, which went to charity.

Loved the idea, but I've heard nothing about it since. Anyone able to confirm or deny this plan of action?

Taken from www.eurogamer.net:

One interesting aspect of this which sadly didn't make the final cut was the idea of selling two versions of the game at different prices. "Originally we wanted to do a black box which was two pounds cheaper than the white box, and the white box you paid more but that went directly to charity. It's a really nice story - we'd actually arranged to set up all these webcams in African villages, so that people could watch the money from Black & White building buildings. And there was another plan after that, where either you got a voucher to send off money to charity or a Mexican lottery ticket in the black box. But again, you can understand retail - doing anything special like that is just not fun for them. It is a bit of a hassle to stock two different price points [for the same game]."

So unfortunately not. Pity, I agree it was a marjorly cool idea, but probably would be an administrative nightmare....

If you still have doubts that the Voodoo5 6000 was displayed "at a tradeshow somewhere" (ECTS), then you can read another report here from eurogamer.net. It gives a little more information about 3dfx's showing, including how they put a sticker over the upper right hand corner of the screen so you couldn't see the frame rate from cg_drawfps :)