Nintendo has figured out that if you flog your old wares in new forms every few years, you can maintain a steady stream of income. Let's recap:
Game & Watch Gallery series brings their 1980s Game & Watch devices to the GameBoy and then GameBoy Color and then GameBoy Advance. Further, you can get keychain versions of the same games (although they may have discontinued them now).
E-Reader cards with rehashed NES games.
SNES games reworked for the GBA, including a remake of SNES Zelda.
Port of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a bonus for GameCube Zelda preorders
Remake of Resident Evil for GameCube using all new graphics and some new features.
Rereleases of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 for the GameCube at the outrageous price of $40 each. Very little, if anything, updated since the DreamCast versions of these games.
Now, here we go with a remake of Metal Gear Solid...what next? Final Fantasy VII for the GameCube too?
...but without the awful dialogue and hammy voice acting. When you get right down to it, Max Payne was a hum-drum first person shooter with a bullet-time gimmick and some writing that tried so hard to be good that it was just bad. If Max Payne hadn't had bullet-time, then I doubt that people would have given it a second thought.
It really doesn't surprise me that the creators of Max Payne sanctioned this. They were lauded for their effort and this movie rises to the same level of skill. Oh well.
I think my biggest gripe is that the price is so outrageous. Isn't it $40 for the reader and a game? That's more than half of the price of an old-style GBA, and it only allows you to play a handful of games.
As you've pointed out, they need more software. They should also bring the hardware down to (at most) $15. Tack an extra dollar on to each game you sell for it, and put out more (good) games. Then it'll be worth it, both for Nintendo and the buyers.
Please answer me this one question: Suppose WineX becomes perfect. Suppose Linux gamers by thousands load up their games and enjoy the latest Windows games. Suppose as a result Windows game developers see incrementally better sales (less than 5%, probably closer to 1-2%). Now, why in the world would they suddenly throw away all the code, tools, and experience they have on their current platform to grab some tiny extra percentage by learning, developing for, and testing on a new platform?
After all they can happily tell those Linux people "You're unsupported. But try WineX!" When it fails, they simply say "You're unsupported!" They already have your money, after all, and it's your own fault for trying it on an unsupported platform.
Let's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games? It isn't bloody likely to convince anyone to leave Windows, the platform for which those games were made in the first place.
Look at Bleemcast (PSX emulator for Sega Dreamcast). It emulated the original games on a different platform, even with graphical enhancements, but it didn't convince anyone who already had a PSX to jump on the Dreamcast...it just made already-committed Dreamcast owners happier.
Yes, something that's not within the scope of the original project. Mozilla is a lot of things, but it isn't a window manager or desktop. Your idea would be neat and, admittedly, would appeal to propellerheads like myself.
Ok, good start, I suppose. But, most of those look like they are (a) repackaging of raw Mozilla (e.g. into several Linux distributions) or (b) rebranding or rewrapping of the Mozilla browser (e.g. IBM's products). The other projets, Komodo and OEOne, which appear to use it as the basis for a real product, are better examples of how Mozilla is paying off.
I suppose I'm sort of underwhelmed here. Yes, lots of big names on that list, but again mostly rebranding or repackaging. I'd like to have seen more examples of taking the Mozilla techs as a cross-platform toolkit and building something really remarkable with it.
I'll give an example. How about a Mozilla-based app that leverages Mozilla's cross-platform nature to build a P2P app with search and chat features. Make use of the NNTP components to provide sharing directly from binary newsgroups into your own collection and from there to connected P2P clients. Also provide primitive email handling to send P2P-collected files to friends via email. The whole idea of the Mozilla platform lends itself to building an app that uses all those bits in novel ways, and gives you cross-platformness as a bonus. (Yes, this is a RIAA/MPAA nightmare app, but probably no worse than what they're already facing.)
Certainly LimeWire uses Java to do similar things, but Mozilla has a number of the same techs reimplemented that Java has so one would think that Mozilla could do the same kind of thing.
Often the folks that make Mozilla talk about meeting the needs of the integrators, the people for whom Mozilla is a platform on which applications are built. Presumably, these are the kinds of people that take advantage of the MPL to make commercial products. But, other than Netscape and AOL, who are these companies and individuals?
That is to say, for all the effort poured into Mozilla, has anyone besides AOL-Time Warner benefitted from it? What are real-world examples of the Mozilla code, under the MPL or otherwise, being used for commercial gain?
Well, this is the line that seems ambiguous to me (from the FAQ):
Note that software developed with Qt Free Edition must be distributed as free/Open Source software; i.e. the receivers must be free to give it to whomever they like.
That seems to say that code developed with free Qt must be free, always. Doesn't that mean that the code in a commercial app which was developed with free Qt must continue to be free. Can you explain how dual licensing means that my reading of the above bit of the FAQ is incorrect? (Honestly asking for clarification, not being confrontational.)
I thought about this when the slides were linked to last week in another story, and I thought I'd throw it out there.
As I understood it at the time, if you use free Qt then your program can never be non-GPL (or at least non-free). That is, any work done with free Qt has be free software, which means that even the original developer (who is normally free to fork to a non-free version) can't fork his/her project into a commercial, closed version.
Take, for example, TuxRacer. There is a non-free version of it for sale, and a free version from the source before the fork. If it had been developed with free Qt, then my reading is that it could not have been forked and made into non-free software for profit.
Since GTK+ is only LGPL, then I feel that it allows projects to grow in a free software world and, if and when it is deemed necessary by the author (copyright holder), forked into a project that is non-free.
Not that I think that's a very friendly thing to do (if you accept the RMS view), but it does seem to me to be a fairly significant limitation on what one can do with software originally developed with free Qt.
This is just my view after reading the free Qt FAQ. I'd be happy to hear arguments against my reading of that document, or if someone wants to go through the free Qt license and ensure that it indeed says something different.
We are, indeed, all tied up by our very own language in this matter. It would be unwise to let Congress ram a bill down our throats that satisfies many people, I'd argue passionately that a long, hard battle over the real issues would lead to legislation that would please everyone in the end. Even those who are into deviant sects could potentially be won over, provided that a compromise is hammered out.
I have the copy of this that I bought back when it came out. Or, rather, my dad bought it for me. I remember showing it to him and having him ask "What? Are you going to start talking to the refrigerator with this?"
Good old dad. Never has understood what "machine language" really means, and still doesn't care.
It's a good book, if you want ot know 6502. Give it a try and then start coding for the Atari 2600 or Commodore 64.
If that were true, then nobody playing Half Life or any of its variations would ever buy another online game which doesn't seem to be true. [snip] In short, you're over-thinking the comment of ONE person and extending it to some sort of thesis that applies to every online console gamer.
It is a fact that no other first person shooter has ever reached the online audience that Half-Life and its mods have. So, while people may be buying those other first person shooters, the time they've already invested and continue to invest in Half-life is time lost by the newer entries. It wouldn't surprise me to find that other shooters have had such a hard time succeeding precisely because Half-life has already so monopolized gamer's available time. And, I don't think it's that large of a leap to say that some gamers, adequately satisfied with Half-life, will pass up at least a few $50 games that might otherwise be bought.
I don't think that this is just a comment from one person that I'm extending to a general statement; I think, in fact, that the effect I'm talking about has already manifested itself! And once someone owns an FPS, a strategy game, and an MMORPG, all online-capable, they may well need a huge incentive to give up the time and money investment they've already made.
You do have a good point that console gamers are a different brand of gamer from PC gamers, so it may be that that makes a difference.
I don't feel that your repsonse addresses the point that I was trying to make. That point is "If a $50 game with online play completely saturates my available gaming time for months, then I'm less likely to buy more games, and in particular more online games, during that time." So while 300k users might consider buying some online-enabled game (separate from an online-updated game like Splinter Cell, for this discussion) I doubt that anywhere close to most of them will buy it because their time will already be consumed by any prior online titles they own.
So, unless you grow the installed base of online-capable users at a rate that keeps the new online games flush with new buyers, then it just can't take off.
A $50 game and a $50/yr subscription can keep a guy totally hooked for months.
Think about that. From that one realization, it seems plausible that online gaming will never be the money maker that people have predicted. With limited appeal and nearly unlimited gameplay, only a handful of companies can make a killing.
A conversation is made better by minimizing quoting? I disagree; a discussion can be made more precise with quoting. I also feel it can eliminate flamousness, because you give context to comments that might otherwise be misconstrued. This isn't to say that quoting doesn't encourage skilled trolls to take posts out of context to make a warped point.
Branching distracts? Quite the opposite; the very structure of USENET threading and threading on Slashdot allows me to ignore irrelevant branches very easily.
Previewing posts isn't good? Sorry, but previews are good for at least two uses in my experience. I get to see my post and reconsider the structure of what I have to say. Also, it allows me to reconsider if I'm about to flame the hell out of someone, or more often remove language that could be misconstrued because of poor word choice.
I really feel that Joel has an idea of how he can force non-technical users to deal with online forums. And that may be fine for his purposes if he has a lot of non-technical users. But forcing users to jump through these hoops does not encourage them to become more proficient users of what I see as more sophisticated, forums. And, in the sense of organizing information, I find the kind of forum he's pushing to be amazingly inefficient, since the idea of a thread of a discussion can be completely destroyed (without draconian topic splitting by moderators).
Honestly, though, it's as if he took every design decision that's part of current forums and decided to provide a contrary view, for the sake of argument. While I think it's great to discuss those structures that we take for granted that might be improved, this seems intentionally controversial without any suggestions for better organizing information.
Ah well. I disagree with his idea of a productive forum, but then I'm a long time USENET user. (This post previewed several times to elaborate on my original two paragraph post. Oh, and I corrected some ambiguous language. And, believe it or not, I kept the original story in another browser tab so I could refer to it, although I didn't quote from it.)
Did you play GTA3? I think that Vice City is not nearly as good as GTA3. Sadly, I'm mostly alone in that view; many reviewers proclaimed it a great sequel, better than the original. I honestly can't see how that can be.
Admittedly, there is plenty of room for everyone to have a favorite episode. But two that I feel should be mentioned are Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire (the story of Santa's Little Helper) and Maggie Makes Three (the story of what happened just before Maggie was born). These two episodes epitomize the side of the Simpsons that celebrates the family, a quality that I feel is too often overlooked by critics.
One of the things I've noticed about the default GNOME 2.x setup on my system (courtesy of Gentoo) is that it's very minimalist. Usually only one app per function and clean, simple menus with descriptive options. (In fairness, I do wish that a few more apps were included by default. Like an integrated mail handler and graphics editor.)
It occurred to me recently, when I tried KDE 3.1, that the way it seems so overdone has always turned me off from KDE. The KDE panel along the bottom is usually crowded with icons. The KDE menus are overflowing with application after application. Perhaps some of this is unneeded crap included by the packager, but I'm willing to be there are fewer menu items and redundant apps in a stock compile of a GNOME desktop than a KDE desktop.
Yes, I know I can clean up KDE until it's minimalist, but I shouldn't have to. I like starting with a clean sandbox and building my castle, thanks. I'd rather not have to tear someone else's castle down first.
Anyway, it has occurred to me that this cleanliness could be awfully appealing to a commercial company looking for a basic environment upon which to build a branded, heavily customized one. Instead of feeling like you have to rip the guts out to find a clean starting place or having to go app-by-app and menu-by-menu and replace or refine what's already there, you can start with a skeleton and build up from there.
Not that anyone's looking to do that, necessarily, but with Sun looking to use GNOME as their standard desktop, I'd like to know how easy it was to start from the baseline and build up.
You know what sucks about that? No other console has mouse ability "out of the box" for use with Kaboom!. In fact, Microsoft has gone to great pains to make the USB controller ports non-standard so you can't just hook up a mouse. The PS2, on the other hand, has a USB port on the front and several PSX analog controls that could have made nice paddle proxies. It really burns me every time I think about how irrevocable and squandered was this opportunity to put a decent Kaboom! on a modern console.
The Atari 2600 homebrew scene just did lose out on a really great opportunity. Activision Anthology, which emulates a ton of Activision titles for the old 2600 on a PS2, was to have an online component which would allow owners of the PS2 disc to download homebrew games for playing on the emulator. That would have absolutely rocked, and I think it would have really given the guys writing these games the kind of credit they deserve.
You can read about that and other interesting bits about Act. Anth. in an interview with the Anthology producer Ken Love.
Slashdot Mirror
- Game & Watch Gallery series brings their 1980s Game & Watch devices to the GameBoy and then GameBoy Color and then GameBoy Advance. Further, you can get keychain versions of the same games (although they may have discontinued them now).
- E-Reader cards with rehashed NES games.
- SNES games reworked for the GBA, including a remake of SNES Zelda.
- Port of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a bonus for GameCube Zelda preorders
- Remake of Resident Evil for GameCube using all new graphics and some new features.
- Rereleases of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 for the GameCube at the outrageous price of $40 each. Very little, if anything, updated since the DreamCast versions of these games.
Now, here we go with a remake of Metal Gear Solid...what next? Final Fantasy VII for the GameCube too?...but without the awful dialogue and hammy voice acting. When you get right down to it, Max Payne was a hum-drum first person shooter with a bullet-time gimmick and some writing that tried so hard to be good that it was just bad. If Max Payne hadn't had bullet-time, then I doubt that people would have given it a second thought.
It really doesn't surprise me that the creators of Max Payne sanctioned this. They were lauded for their effort and this movie rises to the same level of skill. Oh well.
I think my biggest gripe is that the price is so outrageous. Isn't it $40 for the reader and a game? That's more than half of the price of an old-style GBA, and it only allows you to play a handful of games.
As you've pointed out, they need more software. They should also bring the hardware down to (at most) $15. Tack an extra dollar on to each game you sell for it, and put out more (good) games. Then it'll be worth it, both for Nintendo and the buyers.
This is the same publisher that put out the awful Soldier of Fortune port for the PS2? The butchered Earthworm Jim 2 for the GBA?
And who is GlyphX, the developer? What have they done before?
And this is the same Card that wrote the brilliant Ender's Game but the less-than-brilliant sequels?
Sorry, but it's going to take more than those names to make me interested in a game.
Please answer me this one question:
Suppose WineX becomes perfect. Suppose Linux gamers by thousands load up their games and enjoy the latest Windows games. Suppose as a result Windows game developers see incrementally better sales (less than 5%, probably closer to 1-2%). Now, why in the world would they suddenly throw away all the code, tools, and experience they have on their current platform to grab some tiny extra percentage by learning, developing for, and testing on a new platform?
After all they can happily tell those Linux people "You're unsupported. But try WineX!" When it fails, they simply say "You're unsupported!" They already have your money, after all, and it's your own fault for trying it on an unsupported platform.
Let's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games? It isn't bloody likely to convince anyone to leave Windows, the platform for which those games were made in the first place.
Look at Bleemcast (PSX emulator for Sega Dreamcast). It emulated the original games on a different platform, even with graphical enhancements, but it didn't convince anyone who already had a PSX to jump on the Dreamcast...it just made already-committed Dreamcast owners happier.
Um, factories. Yeesh, you non-Americans know very little about modern conveniences.
Sometimes I worry that some people around here got a little bit of alcohol into their blood surrogate.
Free Kevin^H^H^H^H^HMike!
This extra long bumper sticker will go well on all those huge SUVs Americans enjoy so much.
Yes, something that's not within the scope of the original project. Mozilla is a lot of things, but it isn't a window manager or desktop. Your idea would be neat and, admittedly, would appeal to propellerheads like myself.
Drop me a line if you make it.
Ok, good start, I suppose. But, most of those look like they are (a) repackaging of raw Mozilla (e.g. into several Linux distributions) or (b) rebranding or rewrapping of the Mozilla browser (e.g. IBM's products). The other projets, Komodo and OEOne, which appear to use it as the basis for a real product, are better examples of how Mozilla is paying off.
I suppose I'm sort of underwhelmed here. Yes, lots of big names on that list, but again mostly rebranding or repackaging. I'd like to have seen more examples of taking the Mozilla techs as a cross-platform toolkit and building something really remarkable with it.
I'll give an example. How about a Mozilla-based app that leverages Mozilla's cross-platform nature to build a P2P app with search and chat features. Make use of the NNTP components to provide sharing directly from binary newsgroups into your own collection and from there to connected P2P clients. Also provide primitive email handling to send P2P-collected files to friends via email. The whole idea of the Mozilla platform lends itself to building an app that uses all those bits in novel ways, and gives you cross-platformness as a bonus. (Yes, this is a RIAA/MPAA nightmare app, but probably no worse than what they're already facing.)
Certainly LimeWire uses Java to do similar things, but Mozilla has a number of the same techs reimplemented that Java has so one would think that Mozilla could do the same kind of thing.
Often the folks that make Mozilla talk about meeting the needs of the integrators, the people for whom Mozilla is a platform on which applications are built. Presumably, these are the kinds of people that take advantage of the MPL to make commercial products. But, other than Netscape and AOL, who are these companies and individuals?
That is to say, for all the effort poured into Mozilla, has anyone besides AOL-Time Warner benefitted from it? What are real-world examples of the Mozilla code, under the MPL or otherwise, being used for commercial gain?
Borowitz Report has been fairly consistently good. Even prophetic. He had Geraldo un-imbedded a whole week before it really happened. Then there are the Fuck Fries, Saddam Hiding 1 Million US Jobs, and a classic bit on Nucular Weapons. (Yes, you read right. NUCULAR.)
That seems to say that code developed with free Qt must be free, always. Doesn't that mean that the code in a commercial app which was developed with free Qt must continue to be free. Can you explain how dual licensing means that my reading of the above bit of the FAQ is incorrect? (Honestly asking for clarification, not being confrontational.)
I thought about this when the slides were linked to last week in another story, and I thought I'd throw it out there.
As I understood it at the time, if you use free Qt then your program can never be non-GPL (or at least non-free). That is, any work done with free Qt has be free software, which means that even the original developer (who is normally free to fork to a non-free version) can't fork his/her project into a commercial, closed version.
Take, for example, TuxRacer. There is a non-free version of it for sale, and a free version from the source before the fork. If it had been developed with free Qt, then my reading is that it could not have been forked and made into non-free software for profit.
Since GTK+ is only LGPL, then I feel that it allows projects to grow in a free software world and, if and when it is deemed necessary by the author (copyright holder), forked into a project that is non-free.
Not that I think that's a very friendly thing to do (if you accept the RMS view), but it does seem to me to be a fairly significant limitation on what one can do with software originally developed with free Qt.
This is just my view after reading the free Qt FAQ. I'd be happy to hear arguments against my reading of that document, or if someone wants to go through the free Qt license and ensure that it indeed says something different.
We are, indeed, all tied up by our very own language in this matter. It would be unwise to let Congress ram a bill down our throats that satisfies many people, I'd argue passionately that a long, hard battle over the real issues would lead to legislation that would please everyone in the end. Even those who are into deviant sects could potentially be won over, provided that a compromise is hammered out.
I have the copy of this that I bought back when it came out. Or, rather, my dad bought it for me. I remember showing it to him and having him ask "What? Are you going to start talking to the refrigerator with this?"
Good old dad. Never has understood what "machine language" really means, and still doesn't care.
It's a good book, if you want ot know 6502. Give it a try and then start coding for the Atari 2600 or Commodore 64.
It is a fact that no other first person shooter has ever reached the online audience that Half-Life and its mods have. So, while people may be buying those other first person shooters, the time they've already invested and continue to invest in Half-life is time lost by the newer entries. It wouldn't surprise me to find that other shooters have had such a hard time succeeding precisely because Half-life has already so monopolized gamer's available time. And, I don't think it's that large of a leap to say that some gamers, adequately satisfied with Half-life, will pass up at least a few $50 games that might otherwise be bought.
I don't think that this is just a comment from one person that I'm extending to a general statement; I think, in fact, that the effect I'm talking about has already manifested itself! And once someone owns an FPS, a strategy game, and an MMORPG, all online-capable, they may well need a huge incentive to give up the time and money investment they've already made.
You do have a good point that console gamers are a different brand of gamer from PC gamers, so it may be that that makes a difference.
I don't feel that your repsonse addresses the point that I was trying to make. That point is "If a $50 game with online play completely saturates my available gaming time for months, then I'm less likely to buy more games, and in particular more online games, during that time." So while 300k users might consider buying some online-enabled game (separate from an online-updated game like Splinter Cell, for this discussion) I doubt that anywhere close to most of them will buy it because their time will already be consumed by any prior online titles they own.
So, unless you grow the installed base of online-capable users at a rate that keeps the new online games flush with new buyers, then it just can't take off.
Think about that. From that one realization, it seems plausible that online gaming will never be the money maker that people have predicted. With limited appeal and nearly unlimited gameplay, only a handful of companies can make a killing.
A conversation is made better by minimizing quoting? I disagree; a discussion can be made more precise with quoting. I also feel it can eliminate flamousness, because you give context to comments that might otherwise be misconstrued. This isn't to say that quoting doesn't encourage skilled trolls to take posts out of context to make a warped point.
Branching distracts? Quite the opposite; the very structure of USENET threading and threading on Slashdot allows me to ignore irrelevant branches very easily.
Previewing posts isn't good? Sorry, but previews are good for at least two uses in my experience. I get to see my post and reconsider the structure of what I have to say. Also, it allows me to reconsider if I'm about to flame the hell out of someone, or more often remove language that could be misconstrued because of poor word choice.
I really feel that Joel has an idea of how he can force non-technical users to deal with online forums. And that may be fine for his purposes if he has a lot of non-technical users. But forcing users to jump through these hoops does not encourage them to become more proficient users of what I see as more sophisticated, forums. And, in the sense of organizing information, I find the kind of forum he's pushing to be amazingly inefficient, since the idea of a thread of a discussion can be completely destroyed (without draconian topic splitting by moderators).
Honestly, though, it's as if he took every design decision that's part of current forums and decided to provide a contrary view, for the sake of argument. While I think it's great to discuss those structures that we take for granted that might be improved, this seems intentionally controversial without any suggestions for better organizing information.
Ah well. I disagree with his idea of a productive forum, but then I'm a long time USENET user. (This post previewed several times to elaborate on my original two paragraph post. Oh, and I corrected some ambiguous language. And, believe it or not, I kept the original story in another browser tab so I could refer to it, although I didn't quote from it.)
Did you play GTA3? I think that Vice City is not nearly as good as GTA3. Sadly, I'm mostly alone in that view; many reviewers proclaimed it a great sequel, better than the original. I honestly can't see how that can be.
One and two. One could also think of this as a game "in the same line", although they are definitely distinct games.
Admittedly, there is plenty of room for everyone to have a favorite episode. But two that I feel should be mentioned are Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire (the story of Santa's Little Helper) and Maggie Makes Three (the story of what happened just before Maggie was born). These two episodes epitomize the side of the Simpsons that celebrates the family, a quality that I feel is too often overlooked by critics.
One of the things I've noticed about the default GNOME 2.x setup on my system (courtesy of Gentoo) is that it's very minimalist. Usually only one app per function and clean, simple menus with descriptive options. (In fairness, I do wish that a few more apps were included by default. Like an integrated mail handler and graphics editor.)
It occurred to me recently, when I tried KDE 3.1, that the way it seems so overdone has always turned me off from KDE. The KDE panel along the bottom is usually crowded with icons. The KDE menus are overflowing with application after application. Perhaps some of this is unneeded crap included by the packager, but I'm willing to be there are fewer menu items and redundant apps in a stock compile of a GNOME desktop than a KDE desktop.
Yes, I know I can clean up KDE until it's minimalist, but I shouldn't have to. I like starting with a clean sandbox and building my castle, thanks. I'd rather not have to tear someone else's castle down first.
Anyway, it has occurred to me that this cleanliness could be awfully appealing to a commercial company looking for a basic environment upon which to build a branded, heavily customized one. Instead of feeling like you have to rip the guts out to find a clean starting place or having to go app-by-app and menu-by-menu and replace or refine what's already there, you can start with a skeleton and build up from there.
Not that anyone's looking to do that, necessarily, but with Sun looking to use GNOME as their standard desktop, I'd like to know how easy it was to start from the baseline and build up.
You know what sucks about that? No other console has mouse ability "out of the box" for use with Kaboom!. In fact, Microsoft has gone to great pains to make the USB controller ports non-standard so you can't just hook up a mouse. The PS2, on the other hand, has a USB port on the front and several PSX analog controls that could have made nice paddle proxies. It really burns me every time I think about how irrevocable and squandered was this opportunity to put a decent Kaboom! on a modern console.
The Atari 2600 homebrew scene just did lose out on a really great opportunity. Activision Anthology, which emulates a ton of Activision titles for the old 2600 on a PS2, was to have an online component which would allow owners of the PS2 disc to download homebrew games for playing on the emulator. That would have absolutely rocked, and I think it would have really given the guys writing these games the kind of credit they deserve.
You can read about that and other interesting bits about Act. Anth. in an interview with the Anthology producer Ken Love.