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The problem is that most games are too long. Content creation is where the money is spent. Many games seem to feel the need to provide 100+ hours of play. Give us 10 hours of gameplay and charge less, not more, and the majority of people who never finish today's epic games will come flocking to your door.

Or the summary -- fewer Oblivions, more Portals.

Aperture Laboratories is a computer-aided enrichment center to test the Aperture Science Hand-held Portal device.

More information is available in a video.

Aperture Laboratories is a computer-aided enrichment center to test the Aperture Science Hand-held Portal device.

More information is available in a video.

Quick, I need to learn how to translate the following quotes:

"Buildin' a sentry!"
"Teleporter goin' up!"
"Dispenser goin' up!"
"A spy's sappin' mah sentry!"

Oh, and everything here.

There's an open source copy of Guitar Hero called Frets on Fire. There's tons of songs for it, I have about 1000. You can even program your own songs into it. You can use the keyboard to play it or you can pick up a Guitar Hero controler like me and get a USB converter.

I'm pretty much a strict PC gamer myself, meaning the consols I have are the SNES and NES. The current games I've been playing are Orange Box, Audiosurf and Natural Selection . The last which is my favorite game of all time, it's a cross between FPS and RTS, best of all, it's free. The 3 games listed here are cheep (or free) so it won't cost you much to get some good games.

It's a shame... there are still servers, but it's just not the same anymore.

I was an offensive pyro. All the dirty guerrilla tactics that allowed you win as a Pyro have been disabled on the new maps, and I doubt TF2 is going to have anything like the napalm grenades of old.

Last time I tried to play, I turned their 3 man defensive chokepoint in the spiral into a raging inferno, watched the scout zip past, backtracked to the enemy ammo room and snuck in to get more napalm, only to get -10 applied to my score and get called a dirty camper.

All the while, soldiers are bouncing through the map faster than a scout can jumpjet talking about how it's the epitome of skill. Made most of the classes obsolete and most of the natural barriers of the maps irrelevant. Kind of sad.

Hopefully TF2 hits that balanced sweet spot. It looks good. Just about laughed my ass off watching the soldiers rocket jump ballet.

When Half-Life 2: The Orange Box ships later this year, it promises to deliver an impressively wide range of gameplay. First, there's Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the second part of the trilogy follow-up to 2004's blockbuster Half-Life 2. (The Orange Box will also include Half-Life 2 as well as Episode One to get newcomers up to speed.) Next is Team Fortress 2, the stylized, team-based multiplayer action game that's been in development off and on over the past decade. Finally, The Orange Box will also include Portal, the innovative first-person action puzzle game.

The Orange Box is a menagerie of Valve Software's most recent and forthcoming titles, including Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal.

Half-Life 2
Publisher: Vivendi Games
Developer: Valve Software
Released: Nov 04
Estimated Sales: 680,000

Valve says they've sold 4 million copies of Half-Life 2 (here). This means the list's numbers are less than 20% of all sales. The rest was sold outside the US (as the parent pointed out, the PC is more important in Europe and elsewhere) and online. While Valve's Steam means that this is probably more pronounced for HL2 than for other games (otoh certain genres tend to do better in different countries, so even if HL2 is an exception, it shouldn't be the only one) it nevertheless shows that that list is pretty much worthless.

Oh, I don't know, I think that there were a couple of FPS games that were successful because of compelling story.

You're missing the point! A better heatsink means that the heat gets more efficiently transferred to the computer's surroundings, therefore heating your room more efficiently.

I will grant you that computers make great space heaters--they not only heat the room, but they can do all sorts of interesting things in the mean time.

to bumping the video memory from 128 to 256?

You've probably never played Half-Life 2. Surely any new optimizations in the card will add performance to such games and modeling tools if the megs do not...right?

With the activation of prepurchased Half-Life 2 copies today, computer consultant billing rates are expected to skyrocket for the short term. Market demand is expected to drive the rates for available computer consultants to new highs, well exceeding those of the "dot-com" era.

Why, you might ask? In a market economy, goods and services are priced based on available supply and the demand for those goods and services. With hordes of computer consultants electing to "take a little time off to play Half-Life 2," consultants will be able to pick and choose among potential clients and price their services properly to compensate them for foregoing the thrills of Half-Life 2 for a few weeks.

Many political jurisdictions have passed laws designed to protect innocent consumers from predatory pricing after natural disasters. However, State and local "price gouging" laws are not expected to affect this market-based price rise, as the shortage of available consultants is not expected to qualify under the laws' terms. Politicians, reacting to constituents' concerns, are expected to quickly attempt to change the laws to treat "loss of email and/or web services" as a disaster.

The official website should be a showcase for the game, getting us revved up and excited for its release, giving us the lowdown on everything that anyone would wan't to know.

A potential example of that - Bungie Studios' site.

Love them or loathe them, Bungie seem pretty good at that PR thing. Id communicate through occasional updates on their finger service, Valve through emails and posts on other people's forums, and leave their own sites as unsullied, unused shop windows with a few smatterings of out-of-date news and screenshots.