You can use Skype on a PSP, and a Nintendo DS has internet access, so it's only a matter of time (and can probably be done with a mod anyway).
I think the point, though, is that teenagers and college students are going to use the routes available to them to communicate, and many times they'll come up with modes of communication that these people haven't thought about. Twitter's mostly used by teenagers as an RSS feed, not a mode of communication. They use Myspace and Facebook (and whatever other stupid social media site their friends are talking about this week, leaving a wake of dead accounts behind them every couple of months) to track their favorite bands and upload stupid pictures of each other.
Texting and actual calls on a cell phone are used at the beginning of the month, until they start getting close to their limits, then they go into receive-only mode or shut down completely and use IM and VoIP, whether it's on a phone, a computer, or a console (and as mentioned, the console could be a handheld).
You can also use VoIP on a PSP, and probably a Nintendo DS with a little hacking (and the DS has a mic built in, though it's probably not very good). A few phones will do it, too, with the right software.
Usually banks will lease the ATMs or otherwise contract them out, so some other company owns, installs, and maintains the machine (including filling it with cash and receipt rolls). If they wanted to upgrade one machine they'd most likely upgrade all of them at once, or the company that owns the machines would upgrade all of the machines in a particular bank at once so they wouldn't have to keep going back to the same building to replace ATMs (or work with multiple types of machines in the same location).
As for what I normally think of as drive-through tellers, that just depends on the bank. Some banks still have people working the drive-through, though the obvious reason for a drive-through ATM to have braille on the keypad is a combination of state and national laws and the fact that no one wants to produce more types of ATMs than they have to.
Often the simple solutions don't work, either, which is why people need to be better educated about how the whole system works.
Most people that are obese (or even just overweight) will try, before anything else, to reduce their intake. For many (if not most) people, while this might have an initial effect of dropping a couple of pounds, it usually has the reverse effect in the long term of causing the body to store more fat, thinking that the food has gone away.
People need to spread the same food out a bit more and eat more times during the day, and they need to change the types of foods they eat so they are taking in a healthier diet. Usually this can all be done without reducing the amount of food a person is eating, and they will lose weight, because the body feels that food is more plentiful (since they're eating say 5-7 times a day instead of 3), and the food is better for them, making them feel better and possibly increasing their activity level.
Some of the heaviest people I've known in my life eat one or two meals a day. My father lost 50+ pounds by going from eating dinner and possibly a snack before dinner to eating 5 times a day (in fact eating more food, but also healthier food), and eventually increasing his activity level and taking daily walks (which of course increased in distance as he lost more weight).
The main point with dieting is finding a program based on resetting your system to process food properly and training yourself for the long term to eat right, with a clear path from weight loss to weight maintenance. If a diet doesn't include a method to stop losing weight (without regaining), then it's not a real solution. There are also a number of misconceptions about any popular diet plan, and people can easily go down the wrong path by following those misconceptions. The most obvious and popular of these is the Atkins plan, which most people use as an excuse to go out and eat fatty meats all day every day for a month or two and watch the weight 'miraculously' disappear, only to find that they can't keep the weight off when they quit, and it doesn't work as well when they do it again. The actual plan, on the other hand, includes a lot of vegetables and pushes towards adding carbs back into the diet slowly, monitoring the effect the carbs have on your weight, and coming to a level of carb intake that makes sense for your activity levels (and can be maintained, healthily, throughout your life).
The Descent series plays perfectly well with a keyboard + mouse, too. In fact, that may have been the only way I ever played those games, and once you set up the controls to account for the extra freedom of movement, there were only slight differences in handling the game. Even Freespace works well this way. You basically just add two more keys to the movement side of things and you get your extra dimension of movement with few worries.
What killed the joystick market was pretty much the loss of what kept it thriving in the first place: the combat flight sim market.
When every joystick company had to release new sticks for USB and the flight sims were no longer being produced (and the companies were getting bought up or sued into oblivion in the case of Gravis), it was pretty much the end of everyone but Microsoft. When MS became tied to the console market, they pretty much dropped everything and said the 360 controller was good enough for everyone.
Yeah, I already have the 360, but I bought the game for the PS3, because at the time the 360 had the little problem with utilizing the world's loudest DVD drive, only solved by the amazing option of installing the game to the hard drive and only checking the DVD to play the game.
but again, the baby boomers are the ones that vote, or even worse, some of their parents are still around voting. A politician can't try to appeal just to the 20- and 30- (and even 40-) somethings, because the people in their 60s and 70s have all the time in the world to follow politics and go out an vote (why do we vote on weekdays again?).
IBM also had their own fears over antitrust laws, leaving them much more likely to make deals like they did with Intel and Microsoft to avoid government scrutiny (and also not pay a higher cost per unit for the benefit of exclusivity).
Excel's big innovation over Lotus 123 and VisiCalc? Allowing the user to enter text into the cells, making it infinitely more useful, especially to the home user.
Exactly, the word virus as used in the popular press covers the whole spectrum of trojans and just stupid things computer users do when the system allows them to do so (which is almost always for home computer users, because someone in the house needs the root or admin password). Do I want to enable macros for this office document that pretends to be something that could have been sent as a txt file? Umm no. Do I want to let this website install software on my computer? Umm no. and if Vista pops up that dialog asking me for an admin password (or asking me if it's ok if I'm logged in with admin rights)? Umm no.
Further, the dawn of Vista drove a great number of those developers that require admin rights to do anything to fix their software, finally, though MS ended up taking most of the flack for it.
I usually just open documents (and code) side-by-side on my widescreen. It's especially useful when I have to track data across pages. The ancient 4x3 low-res LCD on my desk is primarily used for email and IM, though I occasionally drag a document over to it when I'm having trouble with my eyes (though the screen gives me a headache anyway).
I don't really work with anyone that would write something that didn't fit well on a printed page, so it doesn't make sense to keep a document open full-screen.
I remember once following a road sign that said 'Norfolk', because I had driven into town past Norfolk and past my destination, only to find that I was headed towards the wrong end of Norfolk.
It also doesn't help that the east-bound highway eventually turns west for a fairly long stretch before splitting into a north-bound highway and another east-bound highway (both of which will eventually cross back into the previous highway, with one crossing over and the other ending to compete a loop). So, basically, if you get on the main highway in the city where I currently live, you get on the west-bound highway to head east to the beach, or the east-bound highway to head inland (west), and if you want to go north, you decide whether you want to go the shorter distance (west-bound) to the tunnel that gets the most traffic or the longer distance (east-bound to the north-bound highway) to the tunnel that gets less traffic, or west-bound on another highway through another tunnel to join up with the north-bound highway at the 3-way split.
Supposedly they bring people here before sending them overseas for military operations to get them used to navigating poorly-marked roads, since ignoring what the sign seems to be telling you often makes it easier to get around.
Most of the taxis I've been in over the last few years have had GPS, and it's usually integrated into their system for determining the charges for the trip. They usually get paid for time as well as distance, though, so they have no need to adjust their routes for traffic unless they think they're going to get a decent tip by doing so.
Interestingly the shuttles are usually less likely to go somewhere they've never been before, and are less likely to actually need the GPS.
This all depends heavily on where you are, too. I moved from San Diego to Virginia a few years ago and found it significantly harder to get my bearings because the land is so flat. I never knew how much I relied on mountains and features along the horizon as landmarks for getting my bearing until I ended up living somewhere that has almost none. Usually I'm hemmed in by trees and even when you can get above that all you see is trees and water.
Of course, with the way the traffic is around here, I quickly learned numerous routes to every place I've lived in the last few years. Eventually I just picked up a different set of skills for determining where I am and where I'm headed.
All of that being said, a GPS is invaluable around here for saving gas and time, especially jamming on that detour button when you see break lights and decide to take the exit instead of sit and wait on the highway. It eventually pays for itself under these conditions (especially back when gas was more expensive).
I used to do quite a bit of driving around the country (US) as part of my job (about 2 years ago). I found that picking up a US Atlas helped far more with learning the areas I was driving through (and to) than a GPS ever would. Generally a GPS can get you where you're going, but without planning and occasionally getting lost (and getting back on track on your own), you don't really learn the way around, you just learn to depend on the GPS.
On the other hand, when you just have to have a bit of Chinese food and you don't have internet access handy, the GPS does a decent job of finding that for you.
The main thing Google has going for them in this is the same one that Microsoft has going for them: When someone asks 'where do I get an application to write my important documents? spreadsheets? email?', Google can say 'We have that for you', just like Microsoft does, instead of saying 'You can go here, here, there, over there, or somewhere around there to get that'. People like the answers to be simple, and Google is famous for being simple.
Further, since Google claims to be making the browser the focus of the OS, the interface will already be familiar to most of the users, even if the window dressing is a little different from what they're accustomed to (and really, isn't that the case for most users with Microsoft trying to push XP off the side of the road?).
I don't think this will be the end of the road for Microsoft, but I certainly think it has the chance at being more successful in the Netbook space than Linux has been so far.
Here in Virginia, you're not supposed to smile in your DMV pictures any more because it supposedly messes up facial recognition software used by the state. Guess I have 4 years to find somewhere that doesn't do this before they start tracking my face all over town.
They already probably get paid more than whatever their equivalent would be in the US or China, and get more time off. You can't give them a raise every day to keep them smiling, and this probably works.
Not that I support this in any way, it's just a much more logical way of solving the problem than most, when you really think about it.
The best part of it is that interpretations of laws like this one are used to try to put people into jail for looking at pictures of people that are of legal age that simply look young, or are dressed and staged in a manner that makes some of the people looking at the material see them as being underage. Law forbid someone in porn actually not spend their first paycheck on gigantic breast implants and maybe wear pigtails and a plaid skirt once in a while.
I agree on all fronts, but still feel Neuromancer is worth reading, once. Many of the other books he wrote that share some of the same characters are easier to read (in terms of being less boring), but don't handle the themes of human-machine integration quite as well. Overall, I'm not a particularly big fan of his writing, though I've read most of his books, something about the style just doesn't mesh well with me, and it takes a very long time for me to get through one of his books. Neuromancer may well be the only one worth reading, and one of the hardest to get through, and overall his prescience must have been because of its popularity among computer users, because he is not very good with technological details (and his more recent work suffers because technology is catching up with some of his ideas).
Neither of those would be considered top-of-the-line DS games, though, despite the relatively good sales of Cooking Mama.
There is a lot of garbage on the DS and the Wii that could be brought up in comparison, but that's a shortcoming of having an extremely large market penetration with the hardware. There are still strong titles on the DS and PSP to which nothing on the iPhone could compare. The PSP has a lot of PS2 ports and the DS has a lot of N64 and SNES ports, and even most of those are better than what you see on the iPhone.
The Wii is a success because it was introduced at the right price point with a concept that got people interested in the system.
Most of the people that bought the system, though, have bought few (or no) games for it, and even though you see massive amounts of shovelware on store shelves for the thing because it has the largest installed base, no one is selling large numbers on it, except for a handful of Nintendo titles (usually bundled with hardware, such as Wii Fit, Mario Kart, and Wii Play).
Almost every game I play regularly on the Wii has limited or no support for the motion control. It's not compulsory for the games released on the system. An interesting note, though, is that support has to be added to the game for each type of controller available for the system, so if you have a Wii Classic controller or a GameCube controller, they can only be used on games that have support for them.
In any case, though, I agree that anything released as an add-on is pretty much doomed to limited support. The best example of this is pretty much any hardware add-on released for the PS2: HD video, hard drive, ethernet, eyetoy. The GameCube had a network adapter, as well. Even the newest PS2 games don't often support HD video, and the hard drive and ethernet have extremely limited support in the US, despite being nearly must-have features on all of the current generation consoles (though internal storage is obviously limited on the Wii).
Nintendo does force feedback really well in augmenting the motion sensor system to make it feel more like there's a tactile element to moving across items on the screen. In the end, it's up to the manufacturer to give the developers enough fine-grained control over force feedback options to make it possible to add to the immersion, and then the developers have to use it well for it to provide that capability.
Neither motion sensor technology nor force feedback are worth using if they're used improperly, and frankly, 99% of the time I don't want either one when I'm playing a game. However, when either (or both) is done well, it can definitely enhance the experience of playing a game.
I still buy at least one game a month, it used to be more like 2-5 games a month.
The games I've played the longest are: Team Fortress Classic, Disgaea, Team Fortress, Dark Age of Camelot, and WoW, in roughly that order based on time played. Although Disgaea is rapidly approaching #1 as one of my save files on the PSP port nears the 160 hour mark (combined with other save files and the time I spent on the original PS2 version).
Dark Age of Camelot was the first MMO game I played long enough to pay the monthly fees (I tried many before it), and the primary hooking point was the other people playing the game, not the game itself. WoW I probably played for 1/3 of the time I spent on DAoC, and again it was mostly about the people, not the game.
If I were looking for story over anything else, there are a large number of RPGs in my collection that will supply a good 20-80 hour story that goes beyond anything an MMO has been able to offer so far. Disgaea had a great story, too, but that only explains so many of the hours I've put into that game.
It's the western idea that games and cartoons are juvenile distractions that needs to be changed, not the games and cartoons that go beyond this.
On the other hand, over-the-top violence and gore largely is a juvenile distraction, and judging that a game should be rated 'Mature' because of it is pretty pointless.
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You can use Skype on a PSP, and a Nintendo DS has internet access, so it's only a matter of time (and can probably be done with a mod anyway).
I think the point, though, is that teenagers and college students are going to use the routes available to them to communicate, and many times they'll come up with modes of communication that these people haven't thought about. Twitter's mostly used by teenagers as an RSS feed, not a mode of communication. They use Myspace and Facebook (and whatever other stupid social media site their friends are talking about this week, leaving a wake of dead accounts behind them every couple of months) to track their favorite bands and upload stupid pictures of each other.
Texting and actual calls on a cell phone are used at the beginning of the month, until they start getting close to their limits, then they go into receive-only mode or shut down completely and use IM and VoIP, whether it's on a phone, a computer, or a console (and as mentioned, the console could be a handheld).
You can also use VoIP on a PSP, and probably a Nintendo DS with a little hacking (and the DS has a mic built in, though it's probably not very good). A few phones will do it, too, with the right software.
Usually banks will lease the ATMs or otherwise contract them out, so some other company owns, installs, and maintains the machine (including filling it with cash and receipt rolls). If they wanted to upgrade one machine they'd most likely upgrade all of them at once, or the company that owns the machines would upgrade all of the machines in a particular bank at once so they wouldn't have to keep going back to the same building to replace ATMs (or work with multiple types of machines in the same location).
As for what I normally think of as drive-through tellers, that just depends on the bank. Some banks still have people working the drive-through, though the obvious reason for a drive-through ATM to have braille on the keypad is a combination of state and national laws and the fact that no one wants to produce more types of ATMs than they have to.
Often the simple solutions don't work, either, which is why people need to be better educated about how the whole system works.
Most people that are obese (or even just overweight) will try, before anything else, to reduce their intake. For many (if not most) people, while this might have an initial effect of dropping a couple of pounds, it usually has the reverse effect in the long term of causing the body to store more fat, thinking that the food has gone away.
People need to spread the same food out a bit more and eat more times during the day, and they need to change the types of foods they eat so they are taking in a healthier diet. Usually this can all be done without reducing the amount of food a person is eating, and they will lose weight, because the body feels that food is more plentiful (since they're eating say 5-7 times a day instead of 3), and the food is better for them, making them feel better and possibly increasing their activity level.
Some of the heaviest people I've known in my life eat one or two meals a day. My father lost 50+ pounds by going from eating dinner and possibly a snack before dinner to eating 5 times a day (in fact eating more food, but also healthier food), and eventually increasing his activity level and taking daily walks (which of course increased in distance as he lost more weight).
The main point with dieting is finding a program based on resetting your system to process food properly and training yourself for the long term to eat right, with a clear path from weight loss to weight maintenance. If a diet doesn't include a method to stop losing weight (without regaining), then it's not a real solution. There are also a number of misconceptions about any popular diet plan, and people can easily go down the wrong path by following those misconceptions. The most obvious and popular of these is the Atkins plan, which most people use as an excuse to go out and eat fatty meats all day every day for a month or two and watch the weight 'miraculously' disappear, only to find that they can't keep the weight off when they quit, and it doesn't work as well when they do it again. The actual plan, on the other hand, includes a lot of vegetables and pushes towards adding carbs back into the diet slowly, monitoring the effect the carbs have on your weight, and coming to a level of carb intake that makes sense for your activity levels (and can be maintained, healthily, throughout your life).
The Descent series plays perfectly well with a keyboard + mouse, too. In fact, that may have been the only way I ever played those games, and once you set up the controls to account for the extra freedom of movement, there were only slight differences in handling the game. Even Freespace works well this way. You basically just add two more keys to the movement side of things and you get your extra dimension of movement with few worries.
What killed the joystick market was pretty much the loss of what kept it thriving in the first place: the combat flight sim market.
When every joystick company had to release new sticks for USB and the flight sims were no longer being produced (and the companies were getting bought up or sued into oblivion in the case of Gravis), it was pretty much the end of everyone but Microsoft. When MS became tied to the console market, they pretty much dropped everything and said the 360 controller was good enough for everyone.
You forgot:
Buy another copy of our game!
Yeah, I already have the 360, but I bought the game for the PS3, because at the time the 360 had the little problem with utilizing the world's loudest DVD drive, only solved by the amazing option of installing the game to the hard drive and only checking the DVD to play the game.
but again, the baby boomers are the ones that vote, or even worse, some of their parents are still around voting. A politician can't try to appeal just to the 20- and 30- (and even 40-) somethings, because the people in their 60s and 70s have all the time in the world to follow politics and go out an vote (why do we vote on weekdays again?).
IBM also had their own fears over antitrust laws, leaving them much more likely to make deals like they did with Intel and Microsoft to avoid government scrutiny (and also not pay a higher cost per unit for the benefit of exclusivity).
Excel's big innovation over Lotus 123 and VisiCalc? Allowing the user to enter text into the cells, making it infinitely more useful, especially to the home user.
Exactly, the word virus as used in the popular press covers the whole spectrum of trojans and just stupid things computer users do when the system allows them to do so (which is almost always for home computer users, because someone in the house needs the root or admin password).
Do I want to enable macros for this office document that pretends to be something that could have been sent as a txt file? Umm no.
Do I want to let this website install software on my computer? Umm no.
and if Vista pops up that dialog asking me for an admin password (or asking me if it's ok if I'm logged in with admin rights)? Umm no.
Further, the dawn of Vista drove a great number of those developers that require admin rights to do anything to fix their software, finally, though MS ended up taking most of the flack for it.
I usually just open documents (and code) side-by-side on my widescreen. It's especially useful when I have to track data across pages. The ancient 4x3 low-res LCD on my desk is primarily used for email and IM, though I occasionally drag a document over to it when I'm having trouble with my eyes (though the screen gives me a headache anyway).
I don't really work with anyone that would write something that didn't fit well on a printed page, so it doesn't make sense to keep a document open full-screen.
I remember once following a road sign that said 'Norfolk', because I had driven into town past Norfolk and past my destination, only to find that I was headed towards the wrong end of Norfolk.
It also doesn't help that the east-bound highway eventually turns west for a fairly long stretch before splitting into a north-bound highway and another east-bound highway (both of which will eventually cross back into the previous highway, with one crossing over and the other ending to compete a loop). So, basically, if you get on the main highway in the city where I currently live, you get on the west-bound highway to head east to the beach, or the east-bound highway to head inland (west), and if you want to go north, you decide whether you want to go the shorter distance (west-bound) to the tunnel that gets the most traffic or the longer distance (east-bound to the north-bound highway) to the tunnel that gets less traffic, or west-bound on another highway through another tunnel to join up with the north-bound highway at the 3-way split.
Supposedly they bring people here before sending them overseas for military operations to get them used to navigating poorly-marked roads, since ignoring what the sign seems to be telling you often makes it easier to get around.
Most of the taxis I've been in over the last few years have had GPS, and it's usually integrated into their system for determining the charges for the trip. They usually get paid for time as well as distance, though, so they have no need to adjust their routes for traffic unless they think they're going to get a decent tip by doing so.
Interestingly the shuttles are usually less likely to go somewhere they've never been before, and are less likely to actually need the GPS.
This all depends heavily on where you are, too. I moved from San Diego to Virginia a few years ago and found it significantly harder to get my bearings because the land is so flat. I never knew how much I relied on mountains and features along the horizon as landmarks for getting my bearing until I ended up living somewhere that has almost none. Usually I'm hemmed in by trees and even when you can get above that all you see is trees and water.
Of course, with the way the traffic is around here, I quickly learned numerous routes to every place I've lived in the last few years. Eventually I just picked up a different set of skills for determining where I am and where I'm headed.
All of that being said, a GPS is invaluable around here for saving gas and time, especially jamming on that detour button when you see break lights and decide to take the exit instead of sit and wait on the highway. It eventually pays for itself under these conditions (especially back when gas was more expensive).
I used to do quite a bit of driving around the country (US) as part of my job (about 2 years ago). I found that picking up a US Atlas helped far more with learning the areas I was driving through (and to) than a GPS ever would. Generally a GPS can get you where you're going, but without planning and occasionally getting lost (and getting back on track on your own), you don't really learn the way around, you just learn to depend on the GPS.
On the other hand, when you just have to have a bit of Chinese food and you don't have internet access handy, the GPS does a decent job of finding that for you.
I wouldn't mind them doing this if they permitted Chrome to do some tiling. There's nothing I hate more than running everything full screen.
Then again, we're talking about netbooks, and I guess there's less of a point to tiling windows on a 10" screen.
The main thing Google has going for them in this is the same one that Microsoft has going for them:
When someone asks 'where do I get an application to write my important documents? spreadsheets? email?', Google can say 'We have that for you', just like Microsoft does, instead of saying 'You can go here, here, there, over there, or somewhere around there to get that'. People like the answers to be simple, and Google is famous for being simple.
Further, since Google claims to be making the browser the focus of the OS, the interface will already be familiar to most of the users, even if the window dressing is a little different from what they're accustomed to (and really, isn't that the case for most users with Microsoft trying to push XP off the side of the road?).
I don't think this will be the end of the road for Microsoft, but I certainly think it has the chance at being more successful in the Netbook space than Linux has been so far.
Here in Virginia, you're not supposed to smile in your DMV pictures any more because it supposedly messes up facial recognition software used by the state. Guess I have 4 years to find somewhere that doesn't do this before they start tracking my face all over town.
They already probably get paid more than whatever their equivalent would be in the US or China, and get more time off. You can't give them a raise every day to keep them smiling, and this probably works.
Not that I support this in any way, it's just a much more logical way of solving the problem than most, when you really think about it.
The best part of it is that interpretations of laws like this one are used to try to put people into jail for looking at pictures of people that are of legal age that simply look young, or are dressed and staged in a manner that makes some of the people looking at the material see them as being underage. Law forbid someone in porn actually not spend their first paycheck on gigantic breast implants and maybe wear pigtails and a plaid skirt once in a while.
I agree on all fronts, but still feel Neuromancer is worth reading, once. Many of the other books he wrote that share some of the same characters are easier to read (in terms of being less boring), but don't handle the themes of human-machine integration quite as well. Overall, I'm not a particularly big fan of his writing, though I've read most of his books, something about the style just doesn't mesh well with me, and it takes a very long time for me to get through one of his books. Neuromancer may well be the only one worth reading, and one of the hardest to get through, and overall his prescience must have been because of its popularity among computer users, because he is not very good with technological details (and his more recent work suffers because technology is catching up with some of his ideas).
Neither of those would be considered top-of-the-line DS games, though, despite the relatively good sales of Cooking Mama.
There is a lot of garbage on the DS and the Wii that could be brought up in comparison, but that's a shortcoming of having an extremely large market penetration with the hardware. There are still strong titles on the DS and PSP to which nothing on the iPhone could compare. The PSP has a lot of PS2 ports and the DS has a lot of N64 and SNES ports, and even most of those are better than what you see on the iPhone.
The Wii is a success because it was introduced at the right price point with a concept that got people interested in the system.
Most of the people that bought the system, though, have bought few (or no) games for it, and even though you see massive amounts of shovelware on store shelves for the thing because it has the largest installed base, no one is selling large numbers on it, except for a handful of Nintendo titles (usually bundled with hardware, such as Wii Fit, Mario Kart, and Wii Play).
Almost every game I play regularly on the Wii has limited or no support for the motion control. It's not compulsory for the games released on the system. An interesting note, though, is that support has to be added to the game for each type of controller available for the system, so if you have a Wii Classic controller or a GameCube controller, they can only be used on games that have support for them.
In any case, though, I agree that anything released as an add-on is pretty much doomed to limited support. The best example of this is pretty much any hardware add-on released for the PS2: HD video, hard drive, ethernet, eyetoy. The GameCube had a network adapter, as well. Even the newest PS2 games don't often support HD video, and the hard drive and ethernet have extremely limited support in the US, despite being nearly must-have features on all of the current generation consoles (though internal storage is obviously limited on the Wii).
Nintendo does force feedback really well in augmenting the motion sensor system to make it feel more like there's a tactile element to moving across items on the screen. In the end, it's up to the manufacturer to give the developers enough fine-grained control over force feedback options to make it possible to add to the immersion, and then the developers have to use it well for it to provide that capability.
Neither motion sensor technology nor force feedback are worth using if they're used improperly, and frankly, 99% of the time I don't want either one when I'm playing a game. However, when either (or both) is done well, it can definitely enhance the experience of playing a game.
I still buy at least one game a month, it used to be more like 2-5 games a month.
The games I've played the longest are: Team Fortress Classic, Disgaea, Team Fortress, Dark Age of Camelot, and WoW, in roughly that order based on time played. Although Disgaea is rapidly approaching #1 as one of my save files on the PSP port nears the 160 hour mark (combined with other save files and the time I spent on the original PS2 version).
Dark Age of Camelot was the first MMO game I played long enough to pay the monthly fees (I tried many before it), and the primary hooking point was the other people playing the game, not the game itself. WoW I probably played for 1/3 of the time I spent on DAoC, and again it was mostly about the people, not the game.
If I were looking for story over anything else, there are a large number of RPGs in my collection that will supply a good 20-80 hour story that goes beyond anything an MMO has been able to offer so far. Disgaea had a great story, too, but that only explains so many of the hours I've put into that game.
It's the western idea that games and cartoons are juvenile distractions that needs to be changed, not the games and cartoons that go beyond this.
On the other hand, over-the-top violence and gore largely is a juvenile distraction, and judging that a game should be rated 'Mature' because of it is pretty pointless.