On the PC thats relativly easy to emulate, either with the mouse or with games where the touchscreen is used as 'button pad' you could simply bind different click-positions to a key. On the PSP you could try the same by using its Analog-stick, it probally would never really be as confortable as on a real DS, but its not impossible and might work well enough for some games. If the PSP is actually fast enough to emulate a DS is of course a whole different story.
### I suspect that an increase in patents on game software features might promote innovation in games, since it might be harder to just spit out yet another first-person shooter without getting sued.
Spitting out yet another first person shooter will be easy, since there is tons of prior art, doing something new however will get far trickier since there might be patents for god knows what around that you are infringe without knowing. It also means that if some company actually comes up with a good idea, that it can't get reused in other games, which means there will no longer be any evolution happening in game development.
Re:The "arbitrary barriers" are what annoy me...
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
### And despite having enough weaponry on you to level Myanmar, you have to find a key.
ACK, thats one of the things I loved in DeusEx and Obscure, when there was a door with a window you didn't need to find a key, just use your baseballbat or gun, break the glass and you could easily open it. It really gave the game a much more realistic feel then those other games were everything is indestructable and you have to follow exactly that one 'true' path as designed by the level designer. The key/door pattern is really way overused these days and does really nothing then stretch the length of the game a bit.
### Stop the developers from lowering the standards of gameplay to suit consoles.
The only type of games where consoles are really a problem are complex things like flight simulators where even a PC keyboard doesn't provide enough keys so every key is at least mapped twice. Such games really don't work on consoles, since you simply lack the buttons and resolution to display all that detail. But basically everything else would work if the developers just would try a little bit harder. A XBox controller provides 12 buttons, two of them analog, a digipad and two analogsticks, while you might not be able to assign a button for each and every weapon you can work around that via pie-menus and the like rather well. Yes, you might need a little bit of auto-aim, but then aiming with a mouse doesn't feel like holding a real gun either, so nothing really lost. Same with the size of the levels, while the RAM might be quite a bit less, that can be worked around by either streaming the levels or by cutting down the level of detail a bit. There is really nothing technical that would prevent basically every PC game to be ported to a console from a gameplay point of view, sure you might need to cut down a little bit on the graphics, but thats acceptable given that a console costs a tiny fraction of what a PC costs.
The problem in the end are the publishers which have a weird view of whats acceptable for the audience, so they dumb everything down and was once was a great game on the PC just becomes a pure successor on the console. Not to long ago publishers also thought that RPGs wouldn't be suited for european audience, so CronoTrigger, FinalFantasy3 and the like didn't even make it into the shops of europe, luckily that has changed since then and those types of games seem to sell rather well. Maybe one day we will see the same for other types of games.
Which are basically just bundles of the security updates of the past, so they don't provide any new softwar.
### The step between Woody and Sarge is similar to those between Win95 and Win98
Nope, Windows and Linux are totally different beasts when it comes to releases. Windows just provides a very small base system, kernel + gui, no applications at all beside some very small ones (notepad, calculator, etc.), basically everything that you use on a day to day basis comes from third partys and is released independedly. With Debian on the other side absolute everything comes bundled with the OS, which makes non frequent releases a FAR bigger problem than Windows.
With a Windows it doesn't really matter if you run a five year old release, since you can still run basically all the current applications. With a Linux on the other side you are in throuble if your distro is out of date, you are basically left with two choices, either stick with it, which results in that you miss a whole lot of upstream development or you can start compiling everything yourself, which is a major pain. The lack of binary compability across Linux distros makes it basically impossible to run a old distro together with current software without doing a whole lot of manual work.
### but for a server, I expect something that can be installed and largely forgotten.
For a server I expect something that is current AND can be largly forgotten after install. A distro with frequent releases and long security updates offers that, Debian doesn't, since it provides infrequent releases and short security update support after a new release is out.
Using a Debian stable these days feels sadly far too much like a walk through a museum. Most software in there isn't just a little bit outdated, but large parts are completly obsolte, superseded by much better software upstream.
### I'd just like to voice the opinion that I *like*.. no *LOVE*...the fact that it doesn't change often.
What you miss is that extremly long release cycles are far from the best way to solve the problem of having a 'stable' (as in non changing) installation. A far better way would be recular releases and long security update support for older releases, what Debian gives you is rather random long release cycles and short security support once the new version is out, which might be ok for some people (a very small fraction IMHO), but for a large number of people the lack of current software forces them to run a mix of stable/testing/unstable, switch to Ubuntu, Knoppix or something else. Plain 'stable' is for most people, IMHO by far the largest number of Debian users, nothing useless at the moment.
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
### It's a good thing the gaming industry doesn't listen to players, because we'd all quit playing within a week.
I partly agree that one has to be carefull about what features you add to a game and that to many features can ruin the fun, but the points the article makes are still quite right. Todays games have allocated a whole bunch of standard gamemechanics that you find in basically every game, they might have been a good design choice when they first apeared, but they are now repeated over and over again in every game and players tend to get really tired of still controlling some super soldiers which can't make it over a two feet large blockade, computer controlled 'wingmans' that die withing seconds and are of no use and such. Computer games have turn to much into a 'pick genre, add story and gfx, game done'-cycle, almost every game plays the same, just graphics differ a bit here and there. What I really miss are the early days where there weren't fixed genres, but where almost every game was a genre by itself. Developers should go back and decide what story they want to tell and then design the game around it, today however it feels like its done the reverse, game engine and mechanichs are for most part ready from the start and story is only added as an afterthought. Even after all the years there is still plenty of room for innovations, but sadly hardly anybody is trying anything new, too much just play save.
### Sarge is the new stable, the migration should be transparent on most installations.
Have you ever actually tried that? Its true that Debian might do a dist-upgrade better than any other distro out there, but its still *FAR* from being transparent, there is tons of stuff that breaks and works completly different with the new version. It might not be any issue at all in a @Home installation, but if you have a larger installation of Debian machines and a larger number of users you have quite a huge amount of work todo with a dist-upgrade, there is just to many stuff that has drastically changed in the years and which you can't fix in an evening.
No, Debians QA process is more like "If there aren't any RC bug reports it gets included", unless there was some major change latly Debian doesn't test each and every package, which for less seldomly used packages means that even a completly non-working one (SEGFAULT at startup) can slip into a stable distribution, not much an issue of x86, but for the other archs there is quite a bit of stuff that will compile, but not work.
The problem is that basically no adventure released today is equally good the old ones released a decade ago. Syberia for example looks nice, but gameplay is full of annoying things, tons of doors where you just get some random fill answer, instead of something meaningfull, tons of scenes that serve no purpose beside stretching your ways to walk and such and a story that really isn't all that exciting. Syberia is an ok game, but seriously I stopped playing half the way through since it simply was way to boring for me.
With mostly all other adventure games released these days its the same, they are not bad games, but they don't have nearly the brilliance like the old once, which basically limits them to a rather small audience of adventure game fans.
Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb
on
Inside the Xbox 360
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No idea about the ToyStory claim, but the FinalFantasy one came from Nvidia and was real, since they actually did render some scenes in realtime, however with quite a lot less detail and low framerates, Wikipedia has some screenshots:
### Surely others had the same idea by now. So WTH is preventing Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo from making a controller like that?
Nintendo hasn't yet shown its new controller, so we can't be sure what it will have or won't have, after all it should have something 'new', maybe thats a trackball (or gyros or something completly different). It would make sense, since it would be the next logical step in evolution (first C-buttons, then C-stick, now C-trackball).
For Sony and Microsoft, not sure, but they seem to avoid innovation at all cost, the PS3 Pad is still the exact some as the DualShock on the PS1, only the shape has a bit changed, same for the XBox360 Pad.
Backward compatibility to older console games might also play a role, while a trackball could function with basically all console games by principle, it wouldn't work well with many previous generation games, since they use the analog stick in such a way that would be hard to emulate with a trackball. So either those games would need to be patched, the controller would need to provide an additional stick or they would suffer from the new control.
Overall I wouldn't be suprised to see a trackball on a console controller in the next few years, but some company has to make the first step.
Re:Where to get a three-butten mouse with no rolle
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 1
I hate the scrollwheel as third button, however since most mice these days provide additional buttons its easy to just reconfigure any of them as third button, so I don't have to click the scroll wheel ever. The scroll wheel itself however is quite usefull and I wouldn't want to miss it, its only the clicking which makes it annoying, but if you avoid mice with only two normal buttons you shouldn't have to much throuble.
My walks into Trackball-land so far haven't been of much success, I tried to use a Logitech Trackman for a while, but couldn't stand it for longer periouds of time. Sure it might be better for the wrist, but I found that it pretty effectivly started to kill my thumb. Moving the cursor around with the thumb just doesn't fill very natural to me and resulted in pain rather quickly, so I droped it and switched back to good old mouse.
Another problem I had was that the trackball couldn't really handle faster movements, my mouse can easily track the fastest movement I can do, but the trackball already passed out when I tried to move from one corner of the screen to the other.
### In the case of BitTorrent, it has a LOT of uses that are perfectly legal.
The problem is that you don't need a special torrent search engine for the legal content, google does fine, you only need one for the illegal content. So unless they are working really hard on blocking all obvious illegal content I don't see how this should survive for more then a few weeks, other torrent indexes have already been targeted for exactly that reason.
### Not true. At least with AB/XY, there's a pattern to it.
The worst thing about the PS2 buttons is actually not even the labling, but that games make different use of the buttons. Some games use X for 'Ok', other use [], 'Back' is sometimes O and sometimes X and sometimes/\, which makes it quite confusing. With the Gamecube controller on the other side there is never such confusion, since the primary and secondary buttons are so damn clear, that its basically impossible to assign them in missleading ways.
If I understand this issue correctly it dates back to the SNES, where Y was primary and B secondary for european games, but where A was primary and B secondary for japanese games. Since Nintendo keep pretty strickt quality controll it never became an issue, since all games that got released in europe where changed to follow the other mapping, with PS2 however every developmer seems to assign those buttons as they see fit, which can turn quite confusing, especially if you are not a 24/7 gamer.
### It would seen a better fit for the DS. Lemmings is a game that is controlled best using a mouse.
While a Lemmings for the DS would of course be nice, Lemmings actually plays perfectly well with a controller too. On the SNES edition you could scroll the Levels with L/R, navigate the actions with X/A, apply stuff with Y and accelerate your cursor with B (or something like that, don't remember the exact buttons). While cursor navigation was of course a bit more tricky, the easier access to the actions, scroll without moving the cursor and being able to pause without hitting a GUI button made it still very enjoyable to play.
Two reasons, bad timing and lack of developers. At the time of the 0.6.0 there simply was nobody available to do the windows port and nobody interested enough to go hunt down a windows developer or setup a cross compile environment, let alone test the resulting binary.
Pingus is known to compile under Win32, but its also known to not work 100%, well actually nobody really tested it completly for a long long while, would all be easy to fix if just somebody cared enough to actually do it.
There where also plans to do a 0.6.1 release to fix up all those really ugly spelling errors and do a Win32 release in parallel, but then again that never happened due to lack of developers.
At the moment Pingus development is basically dead.
The new feature of the GBA is its size and design, technically its completly identical to the old GBAs, Nintendo has been rather clear on that. Its for those people that want a small device that really fits in their pocket and doesn't look like a toy and for those that simply collect gameboys:)
If you own already another GBA and are happy no need to buy a Micro, if you always wanted the smallest Gameboy ever, now you can get it.
Its really not much different from what Apple did with the iPod vs iPod mini, a little bit smaller in size, even so the original was already anything but large, but nothing really new beside that.
### cram as many buttons as possible onto the pad, and the fact that as a result of this, the damn thing is huge.
The reason why the XBox controller is so damn huge is even simpler, its not the number of buttons, after all it has the same as the PS2, its simply the two memory card ports. I really don't understand why they put them there, I mean the XBox already has a harddisk, so one slot would have been more then enough and even that would have been much better placed on the console, not on the controller. Those memcard ports are really by far the biggest fault of the controller, beside from that its exactly a pretty nice one.
### Two whole buttons lacking, otherwise, these are all the same...
You forgot the pressable analog-sticks, which PS2 and XBox have, while Gamecube doesn't, which makes a total of 4 buttons less then PS2 or XBox, which is quite significant. It of course doesn't really matter for a standard Nintendo game, since those games are specifically fit for the controller. But for third party games is extremly annoying, since they are specifically designed with more buttons in mind and end up getting ported to the Gamecube rather purely. You end up with joy like being required to press "Start+A" or the like for standard functions or the Z-Button gets abused for in-game actions, which it is really not suited for.
One can live with it, but quite a few third party games suffer quite a bit from poor controlls.
Not sure if its a prerender or really realtime, which doesn't look that unlikly if you compare it to say ResidentEvil4, what it is however for sure is is prescripted. If you script the action you can do lots of fantastic looking things, but gameplay will then turn out rather linear and for sure they will have a hard time filling 20h gameplay with that intensive action, since it would just be an insane amount of work to script all that with all those little details.
So is it pre-rendered? I don't know. Is it actual normal gameplay footage? For sure not. At best it might be the first level or so where they used all their talent and man-power to produce some intense minutes, but normal gameplay will look a hell of a lot different.
The original PS2 controller isn't bad, but far away from perfection. The analog stick of the PS2 is really the worst of all consoles, since its just so damn stupidly placed. In the times of the PS1 that might have been necessary since most games used the digital controlls, but today most game use the analog stick for controlling and then having it in such a thumb-over-stretching position is extremly annoying. Both XBox and the Gamecube controller do it right and position the analog stick at a place where it is easily reached.
The '>' shaped start button, the seperated direction pad buttons, the hard to memorize and communicate Square, Cross, Circel, Triangle naming and the lack of 'real' analog trigger (ie. one that you have a feel for how much you have pressed them) are other, but less critical faults of the PS2 controller.
So far none of the controllers on the market gets really everything right, Gamecube lacks buttons, XBox one is quite 'fat' since for some reason they placed two memory card slots in it, but for a game which needs the analogstick I prefer both of them a lot over the thumb-stretcher which we call PS2 conroller.
Slashdot Mirror
On the PC thats relativly easy to emulate, either with the mouse or with games where the touchscreen is used as 'button pad' you could simply bind different click-positions to a key. On the PSP you could try the same by using its Analog-stick, it probally would never really be as confortable as on a real DS, but its not impossible and might work well enough for some games. If the PSP is actually fast enough to emulate a DS is of course a whole different story.
### I suspect that an increase in patents on game software features might promote innovation in games, since it might be harder to just spit out yet another first-person shooter without getting sued.
Spitting out yet another first person shooter will be easy, since there is tons of prior art, doing something new however will get far trickier since there might be patents for god knows what around that you are infringe without knowing. It also means that if some company actually comes up with a good idea, that it can't get reused in other games, which means there will no longer be any evolution happening in game development.
### And despite having enough weaponry on you to level Myanmar, you have to find a key.
ACK, thats one of the things I loved in DeusEx and Obscure, when there was a door with a window you didn't need to find a key, just use your baseballbat or gun, break the glass and you could easily open it. It really gave the game a much more realistic feel then those other games were everything is indestructable and you have to follow exactly that one 'true' path as designed by the level designer. The key/door pattern is really way overused these days and does really nothing then stretch the length of the game a bit.
### Stop the developers from lowering the standards of gameplay to suit consoles.
The only type of games where consoles are really a problem are complex things like flight simulators where even a PC keyboard doesn't provide enough keys so every key is at least mapped twice. Such games really don't work on consoles, since you simply lack the buttons and resolution to display all that detail. But basically everything else would work if the developers just would try a little bit harder. A XBox controller provides 12 buttons, two of them analog, a digipad and two analogsticks, while you might not be able to assign a button for each and every weapon you can work around that via pie-menus and the like rather well. Yes, you might need a little bit of auto-aim, but then aiming with a mouse doesn't feel like holding a real gun either, so nothing really lost. Same with the size of the levels, while the RAM might be quite a bit less, that can be worked around by either streaming the levels or by cutting down the level of detail a bit. There is really nothing technical that would prevent basically every PC game to be ported to a console from a gameplay point of view, sure you might need to cut down a little bit on the graphics, but thats acceptable given that a console costs a tiny fraction of what a PC costs.
The problem in the end are the publishers which have a weird view of whats acceptable for the audience, so they dumb everything down and was once was a great game on the PC just becomes a pure successor on the console. Not to long ago publishers also thought that RPGs wouldn't be suited for european audience, so CronoTrigger, FinalFantasy3 and the like didn't even make it into the shops of europe, luckily that has changed since then and those types of games seem to sell rather well. Maybe one day we will see the same for other types of games.
### There were 5 point releases since Woody.
Which are basically just bundles of the security updates of the past, so they don't provide any new softwar.
### The step between Woody and Sarge is similar to those between Win95 and Win98
Nope, Windows and Linux are totally different beasts when it comes to releases. Windows just provides a very small base system, kernel + gui, no applications at all beside some very small ones (notepad, calculator, etc.), basically everything that you use on a day to day basis comes from third partys and is released independedly. With Debian on the other side absolute everything comes bundled with the OS, which makes non frequent releases a FAR bigger problem than Windows.
With a Windows it doesn't really matter if you run a five year old release, since you can still run basically all the current applications. With a Linux on the other side you are in throuble if your distro is out of date, you are basically left with two choices, either stick with it, which results in that you miss a whole lot of upstream development or you can start compiling everything yourself, which is a major pain. The lack of binary compability across Linux distros makes it basically impossible to run a old distro together with current software without doing a whole lot of manual work.
### but for a server, I expect something that can be installed and largely forgotten.
For a server I expect something that is current AND can be largly forgotten after install. A distro with frequent releases and long security updates offers that, Debian doesn't, since it provides infrequent releases and short security update support after a new release is out.
Using a Debian stable these days feels sadly far too much like a walk through a museum. Most software in there isn't just a little bit outdated, but large parts are completly obsolte, superseded by much better software upstream.
### I'd just like to voice the opinion that I *like*.. no *LOVE*...the fact that it doesn't change often.
What you miss is that extremly long release cycles are far from the best way to solve the problem of having a 'stable' (as in non changing) installation. A far better way would be recular releases and long security update support for older releases, what Debian gives you is rather random long release cycles and short security support once the new version is out, which might be ok for some people (a very small fraction IMHO), but for a large number of people the lack of current software forces them to run a mix of stable/testing/unstable, switch to Ubuntu, Knoppix or something else. Plain 'stable' is for most people, IMHO by far the largest number of Debian users, nothing useless at the moment.
### It's a good thing the gaming industry doesn't listen to players, because we'd all quit playing within a week.
I partly agree that one has to be carefull about what features you add to a game and that to many features can ruin the fun, but the points the article makes are still quite right. Todays games have allocated a whole bunch of standard gamemechanics that you find in basically every game, they might have been a good design choice when they first apeared, but they are now repeated over and over again in every game and players tend to get really tired of still controlling some super soldiers which can't make it over a two feet large blockade, computer controlled 'wingmans' that die withing seconds and are of no use and such. Computer games have turn to much into a 'pick genre, add story and gfx, game done'-cycle, almost every game plays the same, just graphics differ a bit here and there. What I really miss are the early days where there weren't fixed genres, but where almost every game was a genre by itself. Developers should go back and decide what story they want to tell and then design the game around it, today however it feels like its done the reverse, game engine and mechanichs are for most part ready from the start and story is only added as an afterthought. Even after all the years there is still plenty of room for innovations, but sadly hardly anybody is trying anything new, too much just play save.
### Sarge is the new stable, the migration should be transparent on most installations.
Have you ever actually tried that? Its true that Debian might do a dist-upgrade better than any other distro out there, but its still *FAR* from being transparent, there is tons of stuff that breaks and works completly different with the new version. It might not be any issue at all in a @Home installation, but if you have a larger installation of Debian machines and a larger number of users you have quite a huge amount of work todo with a dist-upgrade, there is just to many stuff that has drastically changed in the years and which you can't fix in an evening.
No, Debians QA process is more like "If there aren't any RC bug reports it gets included", unless there was some major change latly Debian doesn't test each and every package, which for less seldomly used packages means that even a completly non-working one (SEGFAULT at startup) can slip into a stable distribution, not much an issue of x86, but for the other archs there is quite a bit of stuff that will compile, but not work.
### Perhaps he just refuses to believe in something for which there is no evidence beyond the smug assertions of people like you?
And even worse, there isn't even no evidence, there isn't even a clear definition of god.
The problem is that basically no adventure released today is equally good the old ones released a decade ago. Syberia for example looks nice, but gameplay is full of annoying things, tons of doors where you just get some random fill answer, instead of something meaningfull, tons of scenes that serve no purpose beside stretching your ways to walk and such and a story that really isn't all that exciting. Syberia is an ok game, but seriously I stopped playing half the way through since it simply was way to boring for me.
With mostly all other adventure games released these days its the same, they are not bad games, but they don't have nearly the brilliance like the old once, which basically limits them to a rather small audience of adventure game fans.
No idea about the ToyStory claim, but the FinalFantasy one came from Nvidia and was real, since they actually did render some scenes in realtime, however with quite a lot less detail and low framerates, Wikipedia has some screenshots:
p irits_Within
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_S
### Surely others had the same idea by now. So WTH is preventing Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo from making a controller like that?
Nintendo hasn't yet shown its new controller, so we can't be sure what it will have or won't have, after all it should have something 'new', maybe thats a trackball (or gyros or something completly different). It would make sense, since it would be the next logical step in evolution (first C-buttons, then C-stick, now C-trackball).
For Sony and Microsoft, not sure, but they seem to avoid innovation at all cost, the PS3 Pad is still the exact some as the DualShock on the PS1, only the shape has a bit changed, same for the XBox360 Pad.
Backward compatibility to older console games might also play a role, while a trackball could function with basically all console games by principle, it wouldn't work well with many previous generation games, since they use the analog stick in such a way that would be hard to emulate with a trackball. So either those games would need to be patched, the controller would need to provide an additional stick or they would suffer from the new control.
Overall I wouldn't be suprised to see a trackball on a console controller in the next few years, but some company has to make the first step.
I hate the scrollwheel as third button, however since most mice these days provide additional buttons its easy to just reconfigure any of them as third button, so I don't have to click the scroll wheel ever. The scroll wheel itself however is quite usefull and I wouldn't want to miss it, its only the clicking which makes it annoying, but if you avoid mice with only two normal buttons you shouldn't have to much throuble.
My walks into Trackball-land so far haven't been of much success, I tried to use a Logitech Trackman for a while, but couldn't stand it for longer periouds of time. Sure it might be better for the wrist, but I found that it pretty effectivly started to kill my thumb. Moving the cursor around with the thumb just doesn't fill very natural to me and resulted in pain rather quickly, so I droped it and switched back to good old mouse.
Another problem I had was that the trackball couldn't really handle faster movements, my mouse can easily track the fastest movement I can do, but the trackball already passed out when I tried to move from one corner of the screen to the other.
### In the case of BitTorrent, it has a LOT of uses that are perfectly legal.
The problem is that you don't need a special torrent search engine for the legal content, google does fine, you only need one for the illegal content. So unless they are working really hard on blocking all obvious illegal content I don't see how this should survive for more then a few weeks, other torrent indexes have already been targeted for exactly that reason.
Never having touched such a thing, but if its USB, doesn't the normal HID driver work?
### Not true. At least with AB/XY, there's a pattern to it.
/\, which makes it quite confusing. With the Gamecube controller on the other side there is never such confusion, since the primary and secondary buttons are so damn clear, that its basically impossible to assign them in missleading ways.
The worst thing about the PS2 buttons is actually not even the labling, but that games make different use of the buttons. Some games use X for 'Ok', other use [], 'Back' is sometimes O and sometimes X and sometimes
If I understand this issue correctly it dates back to the SNES, where Y was primary and B secondary for european games, but where A was primary and B secondary for japanese games. Since Nintendo keep pretty strickt quality controll it never became an issue, since all games that got released in europe where changed to follow the other mapping, with PS2 however every developmer seems to assign those buttons as they see fit, which can turn quite confusing, especially if you are not a 24/7 gamer.
### It would seen a better fit for the DS. Lemmings is a game that is controlled best using a mouse.
While a Lemmings for the DS would of course be nice, Lemmings actually plays perfectly well with a controller too. On the SNES edition you could scroll the Levels with L/R, navigate the actions with X/A, apply stuff with Y and accelerate your cursor with B (or something like that, don't remember the exact buttons). While cursor navigation was of course a bit more tricky, the easier access to the actions, scroll without moving the cursor and being able to pause without hitting a GUI button made it still very enjoyable to play.
Two reasons, bad timing and lack of developers. At the time of the 0.6.0 there simply was nobody available to do the windows port and nobody interested enough to go hunt down a windows developer or setup a cross compile environment, let alone test the resulting binary.
Pingus is known to compile under Win32, but its also known to not work 100%, well actually nobody really tested it completly for a long long while, would all be easy to fix if just somebody cared enough to actually do it.
There where also plans to do a 0.6.1 release to fix up all those really ugly spelling errors and do a Win32 release in parallel, but then again that never happened due to lack of developers.
At the moment Pingus development is basically dead.
The new feature of the GBA is its size and design, technically its completly identical to the old GBAs, Nintendo has been rather clear on that. Its for those people that want a small device that really fits in their pocket and doesn't look like a toy and for those that simply collect gameboys :)
If you own already another GBA and are happy no need to buy a Micro, if you always wanted the smallest Gameboy ever, now you can get it.
Its really not much different from what Apple did with the iPod vs iPod mini, a little bit smaller in size, even so the original was already anything but large, but nothing really new beside that.
### cram as many buttons as possible onto the pad, and the fact that as a result of this, the damn thing is huge.
The reason why the XBox controller is so damn huge is even simpler, its not the number of buttons, after all it has the same as the PS2, its simply the two memory card ports. I really don't understand why they put them there, I mean the XBox already has a harddisk, so one slot would have been more then enough and even that would have been much better placed on the console, not on the controller. Those memcard ports are really by far the biggest fault of the controller, beside from that its exactly a pretty nice one.
### Two whole buttons lacking, otherwise, these are all the same...
You forgot the pressable analog-sticks, which PS2 and XBox have, while Gamecube doesn't, which makes a total of 4 buttons less then PS2 or XBox, which is quite significant. It of course doesn't really matter for a standard Nintendo game, since those games are specifically fit for the controller. But for third party games is extremly annoying, since they are specifically designed with more buttons in mind and end up getting ported to the Gamecube rather purely. You end up with joy like being required to press "Start+A" or the like for standard functions or the Z-Button gets abused for in-game actions, which it is really not suited for.
One can live with it, but quite a few third party games suffer quite a bit from poor controlls.
Not sure if its a prerender or really realtime, which doesn't look that unlikly if you compare it to say ResidentEvil4, what it is however for sure is is prescripted. If you script the action you can do lots of fantastic looking things, but gameplay will then turn out rather linear and for sure they will have a hard time filling 20h gameplay with that intensive action, since it would just be an insane amount of work to script all that with all those little details.
So is it pre-rendered? I don't know. Is it actual normal gameplay footage? For sure not. At best it might be the first level or so where they used all their talent and man-power to produce some intense minutes, but normal gameplay will look a hell of a lot different.
The original PS2 controller isn't bad, but far away from perfection. The analog stick of the PS2 is really the worst of all consoles, since its just so damn stupidly placed. In the times of the PS1 that might have been necessary since most games used the digital controlls, but today most game use the analog stick for controlling and then having it in such a thumb-over-stretching position is extremly annoying. Both XBox and the Gamecube controller do it right and position the analog stick at a place where it is easily reached.
The '>' shaped start button, the seperated direction pad buttons, the hard to memorize and communicate Square, Cross, Circel, Triangle naming and the lack of 'real' analog trigger (ie. one that you have a feel for how much you have pressed them) are other, but less critical faults of the PS2 controller.
So far none of the controllers on the market gets really everything right, Gamecube lacks buttons, XBox one is quite 'fat' since for some reason they placed two memory card slots in it, but for a game which needs the analogstick I prefer both of them a lot over the thumb-stretcher which we call PS2 conroller.