If you were unable to copy games as easily as you are now we wouldn't be having this discussion.
If everyone had MORALS we wouldn't be having this discussion. Blaming the manufacturers for piracy is like blaming homeowners for being burglarized because they didn't put bars on the windows.
The problem with your analysis of those legal excerpts is that they use the word "conformity" and you use the word "like." Under your interpretation, you could buy a book, take it home, read it, dislike it and then return it for a refund. Because the question of whether an entertainment product "conforms" to consumer expecations and/or needs is subjective, you can't apply the law in that fashion (the only exception would be software that just plain doesn't work). If you could, then the industry would simply collapse since you couldn't possibly make law specific enough to cover, for example, disliking the ending of a video game, disliking the lack of customizable controls, etc.
If people think that $50 is too much to risk on a game they know little about then they need to either a) start paying attention and gathering information before purchasing, b) wait for games to decrease in price, or c) stop buying video games altogether.
Your RIAA comparison is WAY out of line. The RIAA is an organization of "content" providers who are dedicated to maintaining an arguably dying industry - price-fixing, ridiculous lawsuits, etc. are their stock in trade. Video game stores on the other hand, are RETAILERS operating on the margins. They actually buy those games and then resell them. There's a reason that there are virtually no sales on video games (sometimes PC games can go for $5 off MSRP but never the same thing for console games unless there's a wholesale incentive), and it's that they're operating on a fairly tight margin.
This issue, to me, is no different than arguing for the ability to return books or audio CDs if you decide that you don't like them - generally, you can't, and for good reasons. The best reason is that it's not the retailer's fault that you didn't like the game (unless perhaps an employee told you that it was the best thing ever - for example "Run Like Hell is like Half-Life but BETTER!"). If you didn't do the research on the game before the purchase, why should that be the problem of Electronics Boutique or Gamestop (or whomever)?
The other big problem with video games is that they're for the most part a youth-oriented medium. That means that if there's a store policy to abuse, those kids are even more likely to abuse it. I watch some message boards over at GameFAQs a bit and this past year I've seen a hundred or more posts bragging about taking advantage of Wal-Mart's very liberal return policies. Specifically, they would find video games that had been discounted by other stores but which weren't yet discounted at Wal-Mart - a big example being Beach Spikers. These punk kids would go and buy Beach Spikers for $10 at Best Buy and then return it to Wal-Mart where it was still listed at the original $40 or $50 price. They saw nothing wrong with this since "Wal-Mart is a big corporation and they can afford it" or "Wal-Mart puts little companies out of business so they deserve whatever they get." Admittedly, flexible [or nonexistant] morals aren't entirely a problem of youth but they certainly are more common in young people who haven't learned about consequences and personal responsibility.
In short, I personally advocate a FOUR-HOUR no-questions-asked return policy. While some folks I'm sure would use this to take the game home and copy it for later play, it would at least eliminate those people who for some reason can't be bothered to do their own research or get an account with Blockbuster or the new Netflix-like Internet game rental service (my apologies, but I can't recall the name right now). Just be sure to buy your games and then go home and try them out right away, and there shouldn't be a problem. Any return policy measured in days or longer is just going to hose retailers.
I don't care if they put the date on the front of the box in six-inch bold type. The simple fact is that someone who enjoys playing PS2 Madden football online is SOL once the next version hits unless they buy the game, and for no "good" reason except that EA wants to hit the customer up for another $50 every year for games that change relatively little between versions.
EA is doing its customers dirty on this issue and then uses Microsoft as their scapegoat when explaining their lack of Xbox Live support - and some people buy right into it. Critical thinking is on life support.
Doctors, lawyers and priests. Those are the people from whom people should be expecting true confidentiality from, particularly in terms of law enforcement cooperation.
Now, I know that there are privacy advocates who believe that everything on the Internet should be anonymous without the express consent of each individual, but that's impractical and isn't always in the public interest. For example, if police know that a criminal shopped at a particular brick and mortar store, they can request lists of transactions along with credit card information. Though these establishments CAN force the police to get a court order, they're under no obligation to do so because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the average sales transaction. The same should apply to eBay.
Now, I'm assuming that someone on eBay actually contacts those police departments that request information in a reasonable attempt to verify their identity and keeps a record of said requests (they have numbers so they must at least do the latter), but beyond that I don't think they have a responsibility to make law inforcement jump through more legal hoops. I would imagine that most requests for information from eBay have to do with fraud complaints and I would further argue that eBay has a vested interest, and a responsibility to their customers, in seeing that such cases are resolved and criminals are prosecuted.
Unless eBay is accommodating law enforcements requests for lists of people who buy or sell particular products (autographed copy of Mein Kampf, anyone?), I see this as a non-issue.
Actually, I think you're guilty of promoting ANTI-Microsoft FUD. Of course EA is in the business of selling games, but the way they're doing it is by FORCING people into it. I wonder how supportive PC folks would be if Valve decided to turn off online play with Half-Life/modded Half-Life once Half-Life 2 came out. After all, Valve is in the business of selling games, too...
Exactly, exactly. A lot of people have blamed Microsoft for the fact that EA isn't supporting Xbox Live (because it's natural to blame Microsoft for anything), but the truth is that EA is the bad guy on this one. Their claim that they can't make money on Xbox Live is ridiculous considering that (according to Microsoft) there are half a million subscribers to the service. That's a hefty number even if you plan on selling TEN million copies of a game and it's probably not the best idea to alienate those people since more and more of them over time will eschew non-Live compatible games in favor of those that work with their service.
X-wing vs Tie-fighter. I am not 100% sure but around this time a logo started to spring up when you loaded the game. It was amazing bright and cheerfull. It also was glaringly out of place. What is it with all these fucking logos? Why did they outsource the development or something? I buy a lucasarts game. Not just something rebadged.
Actually, in this particular case, it was only SORT OF outsourcing since the people they outsourced to were Totally Games, a company formed by Larry Holland, the former LucasArts employee who was responsible for all of the flight/space simulation-type (PC) successes of LucasArts, starting with Battlehawks 1942 and my personal favorite of those days Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. Right now, the two companies are collaborating on Secret Weapons Over Normandy which, if it captures half the magic of the classic Secret Weappons of the Luftwaffe, will be excellent.
Amen, amen. There's too much of this "I played Final Fantasy before it took over the world" elitism. I owned the NES and SNES for a total of four months (at different times) because I had too much going on and enjoyed PC gaming too much, so I never got the Final Fantasy experience until VII - Dragon Warrior was the only console RPG I played before FFVII and I loved it. I didn't even play VII until almost a year after it came out.
Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of FFVII, beating the game once without assistance and then going back and doing things like raising chocobos and gathering the crazy powerful stuff. It was the third RPG that I put over a hundred hours into (after The Bard's Tale on C64 and Darklands on PC) and it was time I felt very good about.
Nostalgia is great. Being selective about games is great. Dismissing the impact that Final Fantasy VII had on the console world (particularly the console RPG world), both in terms of its popularity and gameplay, by calling it "overrated" is just foolish.
Oh come on. If they were experts, they might at least be able to find games that actually fit the word they chose for the list: "overrated." Daikatana, Super Mario Sunshine, Black & White...All of these are examples of games that were, and are, "rated" relatively low despite the hype. SMS was [rightly] criticized as being Super Mario 3D without the accessibility/difficulty curve, Daikatana was shunned as being a barely [or below] average FPS and Black & White was tarred and feathered for failing to meet Molyneux's lofty goals.
If you go through the list, you'd be lucky to find five or six games that are truly over-rated, as opposed to being over-hyped which is an entirely different animal. Of course, the only way to fix the over-hyping problem is for gaming journalists to actually practice some, well, journalism - instead, they choose to regurgitate press releases, wait around for marketing people to call them offering interviews and pontificate about "the state of gaming."
Then Starfleet Command...who here has played this besides me? And I liked the game. If you don't, it's probably because you didn't like Star Fleet Battles, the game it was based off of.
That was the entry that perplexed me the most. They criticize the interface as being too complex, but if you give the game an hour you can easily master it (and once it IS mastered, it becomes as natural as any FPS layout). They complain that the pace was too slow, but Starfleet Battles was always about big, relatively ungainly starships throwing broadsides at each other (one wonders if they consider Harpoon to be "glacial" in its pace). Then, they cap it off by insulting the people who DID like the game, as if the game were so bad that nobody should ever like it - SFC doesn't come CLOSE to that level of bad, even in its worst mission.
The whole article was yet another excuse for a group of gaming website geeks to get together and show a) how cool they are in that they're the arbiters of what's good and what's not and b) that focusing on the negative is a lot more fun than focusing on the positive. Hell, it wasn't even REALLY about over-rated games...For example, Daikatana might have been eagerly anticipated and over-hyped but it was NEVER over-rated after its release. If anything, it was probably UNDER-rated because it so failed to live up to the lofty expectations. Enter The Matrix probably falls into the same category. Those two games made their TOP FOUR of over-rated games.
Gamers, particularly gamer critics, have become so obsessed with the idea that they know what makes the perfect game that they can't even acknowledge that "fun" has always been the goal. Unless, of course, the game is the sequel to GTA3 which they will forgive innumerable bugs and weak graphics where any other game would be shunned.
There's a significant difference in that x86 processors are commodity items. In addition, most processor price cuts occur when newer processors arrive at the top which shove all the slower processors down a notch (or a couple of notches depending on how many new processors hit the market). This has the net effect that you'll be paying about the same amount for the fastest processor whenever you happen to buy it.
With Apple, they upgrade their product line and promptly discontinue production of the old products which means that there is no lower tier which would reap the decreased cost benefit of the upgrades. Because of this, it's not in Apple's best interest to announce upgraded product lines ahead of time because it would have a chilling effect on the sales of the products they've already produced. This phenomenon can also be noted in the game console industry where price cuts may be rumored for a while but no confirmation announcement will be handed down until the price cuts take place. For example, if Nintendo announced today that as of October 1st the Gamecube would be $99 instead of $150, that would be tantamount to Nintendo saying "You shouldn't buy a Gamecube until next month."
I leave my e-mail address untouched because a) it amuses me that all the spam garbage occupies Microsoft bandwidth (it's really my only form of "protest," considering my use of Windows and enjoyment of my Xbox) and b) their spam filter seems to work very well when I use it with Outlook Express (no, I'm not spreading Outlook viruses). I average around 80-100 spam per day on that account - which is a relatively low number and contains relatively few duplicates - so at least the harvesters are using software smart enough to only grab each address once.:)
It's not strange at all considering that WHOIS information can be changed. It's the same reason they used a Google cache link to this huckster's, er, entrepreneur's own website.
Forgive me, but how does that explain why a Half-Life Linux client was never released, or why a Linux port of HL2 hasn't even been put on the table for a future release (if the per-pixel shading is a game-killing issue that could DELAY the game)?
My point was simple, though you might have missed it: It is not impossible to produce games that can run in both DirectX and OpenGL environments, nor is it impossible to port games from one system to another - originally DirectX or not. Whether the games have exactly the same graphics features is an entirely separate issue. RTFC.
The money that would go into creating a Linux box would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention perhaps impossible because of patents/copyrights on DirectX technology.
I don't think so. If a big issue is DirectX networking, then how do they manage to have a Linux server in the first place? Also, Half-Life had the ability to be rendered using either DirectX or OpenGL - it SEEMS like that would be possible with HL2 as well, thus giving the game the ability to be rendered in Linux (or any other OS with OpenGL compatibility).
Other companies manage to do both OpenGL and DirectX in their games. They even manage to make Mac ports now and then. Some of them even release more than one game every five years...
For me, it's completely irrelevant because I have never had (and may never have) a Linux PC. I further think that the passive resistance concept of avoiding Windows and other Microsoft products is beyond pointless. But the idea that it's somehow impossible to develop a game that works under both DirectX and OpenGL or that it's impossible to port games to different systems and maintain network compatibility is just ludicrous (and not in a hip-hoppin' way).
I may have a suspicious/cynical mind, but could the reason for the one-second intervals BE to generate false positives during the monitoring? If they (the third-party monitoring company) could generate logs claiming that the web server was down a disproportionate amount of time because of said false positives and/or the downtime generated by their own DoS-type activities, they could do things like offering alternative hosting companies (owned by the same company or just getting kickbacks) or offering [unneeded] technical support to "improve" the website to correct nonexistant issues.
If a company did this kind of thing, even if taken to court they could produce the logs that verify the artificial downtime in order to defend themselves against accusations of lying to customers. Then, when asked if their once-per-second monitoring could have been the cause of the problem in the first place, they could make some fanciful BS claims like "a good server should be able to handle that."
My apologies for spinning an entirely hypothetical, and possibly paranoid, scenario. This was the first thing to pop into my incredibly suspicious mind - plus, it has the makings of a good scam if it hasn't already been done.:)
No, I don't think they do. Considering that Sony is claiming near-PS2 quality 3D capability, that the PSP will be able (out of the box) to play movies and music as well as games, and that the GBA is under $100, I think they have some right to consider the GBA as something less than a "high-end device." Besides, what would you expect Sony to believe/say about a product that I'm sure they hope will put a beatdown on the GBA?
I'm not endorsing 6-7 hours as being a great achievement, but keep in mind that the GBA SP isn't what most people (especially Sony) would consider a high-end device. I expect that they're probably comparing it to portable DVD players and multimedia jukebox-type gadgets.
Considering I haven't read anywhere that the Xbox adapter will be incompatible wtih other things, I think you might be jumping the gun assuming that it's not. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that it's a fairly standard ethernet-to-wireless bridge that happens to have Xbox styling and Xbox-specific instructions. Doing anything else would be a needless over-design and would have no benefit since other wireless bridges are perfectly compatible with Xbox Live.
Actually, as I recall, "Unreal Warfare" is the official name of the current engine. They probably just decided it sounded cooler than "The Unreal 2 Engine" (particularly since Unreal 2 was rather a lackluster game beyond the graphics).
That can't program/design their way into the market - so the just buy the whole slices of the market from under everybody else.
Which is exactly what Atari nee Infogrames, Electronic Arts, Vivendi, etc. have done over the years. But it's Microsoft in this case so they suck, I guess.
Actually, they did. They learned that there are people out there (myself included) who are willing to pay $200 for a good game and a good controller to provide an extremely immersive gaming experience. After all, Steel Battalion SOLD OUT. There are still people out there who would like to have the game and can't buy one from a normal retailer (the game is available on eBay and goes for well over $200). Capcom never expected to sell as many copies of Steel Battalion as, say, GTA3 or Halo. But the game apparently sold well enough that the sequel is coming stateside (with Xbox Live play) next year.
Now, I don't know how many people will buy the wireless adaptor but the truth is that the price point is competitive with other 802.11g wireless bridges. At Outpost, for example, the Linksys g-compatible model is selling for $159.99.
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If everyone had MORALS we wouldn't be having this discussion. Blaming the manufacturers for piracy is like blaming homeowners for being burglarized because they didn't put bars on the windows.
If people think that $50 is too much to risk on a game they know little about then they need to either a) start paying attention and gathering information before purchasing, b) wait for games to decrease in price, or c) stop buying video games altogether.
This issue, to me, is no different than arguing for the ability to return books or audio CDs if you decide that you don't like them - generally, you can't, and for good reasons. The best reason is that it's not the retailer's fault that you didn't like the game (unless perhaps an employee told you that it was the best thing ever - for example "Run Like Hell is like Half-Life but BETTER!"). If you didn't do the research on the game before the purchase, why should that be the problem of Electronics Boutique or Gamestop (or whomever)?
The other big problem with video games is that they're for the most part a youth-oriented medium. That means that if there's a store policy to abuse, those kids are even more likely to abuse it. I watch some message boards over at GameFAQs a bit and this past year I've seen a hundred or more posts bragging about taking advantage of Wal-Mart's very liberal return policies. Specifically, they would find video games that had been discounted by other stores but which weren't yet discounted at Wal-Mart - a big example being Beach Spikers. These punk kids would go and buy Beach Spikers for $10 at Best Buy and then return it to Wal-Mart where it was still listed at the original $40 or $50 price. They saw nothing wrong with this since "Wal-Mart is a big corporation and they can afford it" or "Wal-Mart puts little companies out of business so they deserve whatever they get." Admittedly, flexible [or nonexistant] morals aren't entirely a problem of youth but they certainly are more common in young people who haven't learned about consequences and personal responsibility.
In short, I personally advocate a FOUR-HOUR no-questions-asked return policy. While some folks I'm sure would use this to take the game home and copy it for later play, it would at least eliminate those people who for some reason can't be bothered to do their own research or get an account with Blockbuster or the new Netflix-like Internet game rental service (my apologies, but I can't recall the name right now). Just be sure to buy your games and then go home and try them out right away, and there shouldn't be a problem. Any return policy measured in days or longer is just going to hose retailers.
EA is doing its customers dirty on this issue and then uses Microsoft as their scapegoat when explaining their lack of Xbox Live support - and some people buy right into it. Critical thinking is on life support.
Now, I know that there are privacy advocates who believe that everything on the Internet should be anonymous without the express consent of each individual, but that's impractical and isn't always in the public interest. For example, if police know that a criminal shopped at a particular brick and mortar store, they can request lists of transactions along with credit card information. Though these establishments CAN force the police to get a court order, they're under no obligation to do so because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the average sales transaction. The same should apply to eBay.
Now, I'm assuming that someone on eBay actually contacts those police departments that request information in a reasonable attempt to verify their identity and keeps a record of said requests (they have numbers so they must at least do the latter), but beyond that I don't think they have a responsibility to make law inforcement jump through more legal hoops. I would imagine that most requests for information from eBay have to do with fraud complaints and I would further argue that eBay has a vested interest, and a responsibility to their customers, in seeing that such cases are resolved and criminals are prosecuted.
Unless eBay is accommodating law enforcements requests for lists of people who buy or sell particular products (autographed copy of Mein Kampf, anyone?), I see this as a non-issue.
Actually, I think you're guilty of promoting ANTI-Microsoft FUD. Of course EA is in the business of selling games, but the way they're doing it is by FORCING people into it. I wonder how supportive PC folks would be if Valve decided to turn off online play with Half-Life/modded Half-Life once Half-Life 2 came out. After all, Valve is in the business of selling games, too...
Exactly, exactly. A lot of people have blamed Microsoft for the fact that EA isn't supporting Xbox Live (because it's natural to blame Microsoft for anything), but the truth is that EA is the bad guy on this one. Their claim that they can't make money on Xbox Live is ridiculous considering that (according to Microsoft) there are half a million subscribers to the service. That's a hefty number even if you plan on selling TEN million copies of a game and it's probably not the best idea to alienate those people since more and more of them over time will eschew non-Live compatible games in favor of those that work with their service.
Actually, in this particular case, it was only SORT OF outsourcing since the people they outsourced to were Totally Games, a company formed by Larry Holland, the former LucasArts employee who was responsible for all of the flight/space simulation-type (PC) successes of LucasArts, starting with Battlehawks 1942 and my personal favorite of those days Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. Right now, the two companies are collaborating on Secret Weapons Over Normandy which, if it captures half the magic of the classic Secret Weappons of the Luftwaffe, will be excellent.
Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of FFVII, beating the game once without assistance and then going back and doing things like raising chocobos and gathering the crazy powerful stuff. It was the third RPG that I put over a hundred hours into (after The Bard's Tale on C64 and Darklands on PC) and it was time I felt very good about.
Nostalgia is great. Being selective about games is great. Dismissing the impact that Final Fantasy VII had on the console world (particularly the console RPG world), both in terms of its popularity and gameplay, by calling it "overrated" is just foolish.
Oh come on. If they were experts, they might at least be able to find games that actually fit the word they chose for the list: "overrated." Daikatana, Super Mario Sunshine, Black & White...All of these are examples of games that were, and are, "rated" relatively low despite the hype. SMS was [rightly] criticized as being Super Mario 3D without the accessibility/difficulty curve, Daikatana was shunned as being a barely [or below] average FPS and Black & White was tarred and feathered for failing to meet Molyneux's lofty goals.
If you go through the list, you'd be lucky to find five or six games that are truly over-rated, as opposed to being over-hyped which is an entirely different animal. Of course, the only way to fix the over-hyping problem is for gaming journalists to actually practice some, well, journalism - instead, they choose to regurgitate press releases, wait around for marketing people to call them offering interviews and pontificate about "the state of gaming."
That was the entry that perplexed me the most. They criticize the interface as being too complex, but if you give the game an hour you can easily master it (and once it IS mastered, it becomes as natural as any FPS layout). They complain that the pace was too slow, but Starfleet Battles was always about big, relatively ungainly starships throwing broadsides at each other (one wonders if they consider Harpoon to be "glacial" in its pace). Then, they cap it off by insulting the people who DID like the game, as if the game were so bad that nobody should ever like it - SFC doesn't come CLOSE to that level of bad, even in its worst mission.
The whole article was yet another excuse for a group of gaming website geeks to get together and show a) how cool they are in that they're the arbiters of what's good and what's not and b) that focusing on the negative is a lot more fun than focusing on the positive. Hell, it wasn't even REALLY about over-rated games...For example, Daikatana might have been eagerly anticipated and over-hyped but it was NEVER over-rated after its release. If anything, it was probably UNDER-rated because it so failed to live up to the lofty expectations. Enter The Matrix probably falls into the same category. Those two games made their TOP FOUR of over-rated games.
Gamers, particularly gamer critics, have become so obsessed with the idea that they know what makes the perfect game that they can't even acknowledge that "fun" has always been the goal. Unless, of course, the game is the sequel to GTA3 which they will forgive innumerable bugs and weak graphics where any other game would be shunned.
With Apple, they upgrade their product line and promptly discontinue production of the old products which means that there is no lower tier which would reap the decreased cost benefit of the upgrades. Because of this, it's not in Apple's best interest to announce upgraded product lines ahead of time because it would have a chilling effect on the sales of the products they've already produced. This phenomenon can also be noted in the game console industry where price cuts may be rumored for a while but no confirmation announcement will be handed down until the price cuts take place. For example, if Nintendo announced today that as of October 1st the Gamecube would be $99 instead of $150, that would be tantamount to Nintendo saying "You shouldn't buy a Gamecube until next month."
I leave my e-mail address untouched because a) it amuses me that all the spam garbage occupies Microsoft bandwidth (it's really my only form of "protest," considering my use of Windows and enjoyment of my Xbox) and b) their spam filter seems to work very well when I use it with Outlook Express (no, I'm not spreading Outlook viruses). I average around 80-100 spam per day on that account - which is a relatively low number and contains relatively few duplicates - so at least the harvesters are using software smart enough to only grab each address once. :)
It's not strange at all considering that WHOIS information can be changed. It's the same reason they used a Google cache link to this huckster's, er, entrepreneur's own website.
My point was simple, though you might have missed it: It is not impossible to produce games that can run in both DirectX and OpenGL environments, nor is it impossible to port games from one system to another - originally DirectX or not. Whether the games have exactly the same graphics features is an entirely separate issue. RTFC.
I don't think so. If a big issue is DirectX networking, then how do they manage to have a Linux server in the first place? Also, Half-Life had the ability to be rendered using either DirectX or OpenGL - it SEEMS like that would be possible with HL2 as well, thus giving the game the ability to be rendered in Linux (or any other OS with OpenGL compatibility).
Other companies manage to do both OpenGL and DirectX in their games. They even manage to make Mac ports now and then. Some of them even release more than one game every five years...
For me, it's completely irrelevant because I have never had (and may never have) a Linux PC. I further think that the passive resistance concept of avoiding Windows and other Microsoft products is beyond pointless. But the idea that it's somehow impossible to develop a game that works under both DirectX and OpenGL or that it's impossible to port games to different systems and maintain network compatibility is just ludicrous (and not in a hip-hoppin' way).
Not so fast...
According to Joe Lieberman (and obviously others), if you play an FPS for the killing virtual people you have much bigger problems.
If a company did this kind of thing, even if taken to court they could produce the logs that verify the artificial downtime in order to defend themselves against accusations of lying to customers. Then, when asked if their once-per-second monitoring could have been the cause of the problem in the first place, they could make some fanciful BS claims like "a good server should be able to handle that."
My apologies for spinning an entirely hypothetical, and possibly paranoid, scenario. This was the first thing to pop into my incredibly suspicious mind - plus, it has the makings of a good scam if it hasn't already been done. :)
No, I don't think they do. Considering that Sony is claiming near-PS2 quality 3D capability, that the PSP will be able (out of the box) to play movies and music as well as games, and that the GBA is under $100, I think they have some right to consider the GBA as something less than a "high-end device." Besides, what would you expect Sony to believe/say about a product that I'm sure they hope will put a beatdown on the GBA?
I'm not endorsing 6-7 hours as being a great achievement, but keep in mind that the GBA SP isn't what most people (especially Sony) would consider a high-end device. I expect that they're probably comparing it to portable DVD players and multimedia jukebox-type gadgets.
Considering I haven't read anywhere that the Xbox adapter will be incompatible wtih other things, I think you might be jumping the gun assuming that it's not. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that it's a fairly standard ethernet-to-wireless bridge that happens to have Xbox styling and Xbox-specific instructions. Doing anything else would be a needless over-design and would have no benefit since other wireless bridges are perfectly compatible with Xbox Live.
Actually, as I recall, "Unreal Warfare" is the official name of the current engine. They probably just decided it sounded cooler than "The Unreal 2 Engine" (particularly since Unreal 2 was rather a lackluster game beyond the graphics).
Which is exactly what Atari nee Infogrames, Electronic Arts, Vivendi, etc. have done over the years. But it's Microsoft in this case so they suck, I guess.
Actually, they did. They learned that there are people out there (myself included) who are willing to pay $200 for a good game and a good controller to provide an extremely immersive gaming experience. After all, Steel Battalion SOLD OUT. There are still people out there who would like to have the game and can't buy one from a normal retailer (the game is available on eBay and goes for well over $200). Capcom never expected to sell as many copies of Steel Battalion as, say, GTA3 or Halo. But the game apparently sold well enough that the sequel is coming stateside (with Xbox Live play) next year.
Now, I don't know how many people will buy the wireless adaptor but the truth is that the price point is competitive with other 802.11g wireless bridges. At Outpost, for example, the Linksys g-compatible model is selling for $159.99.