I got Portal 2 as game of the year. People tend to forget it, because it came out earlier in the year than most other games. But I think publishers should be applauded, not punished for sending out their games outside the last four months of the year. I don't think we would want it to be like in movies where all great films get send out the last two months of the year, because that improves their chances at the Oscars.

I think experience shows that the way gaming on touch devices works well is not by porting just any game because they are big on other platforms. It needs to be taken into consideration right from the start at a game by game basis whether or not it can work on those devices. This to me seems like a classic "boardroom decision", where people with no experience playing games on these devices see two big figures of the iOS install base and the sales figures of big budget console games, and say "I bet we could make a lot of money combining those two". Pretty much as good an idea as tobacco based alcohol.

I think I would most prefer to see the 60's and 70's California (+Vegas) setting Justin is talking about, and I think it has a fairly good chance of happening. Another possibility is a present day California, possibly as a Hispanic. I don't see much chance that it is gonna be set somewhere other than California. The game has gotten too big for them to be able to come up with enough content for anything but New York and California, and they've just done New York.

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Sad that Valve couldn't have done a little extra for PC users this far into the product cycle. That was after all where they started. But I guess it's just one more manifestation of the decline of PC gaming.

With the graphics it has (about the same as iOS devices), I don't think $250 is that unreasonable. The cheapest iPod touch costs about the the same, and most expensive one costs $400. I know they aren't that comparable in terms of functionality, but I think it kinda give an idea about what people are willing to pay for non-phone handheld devices.

A study in three years of absolute stagnation in video game graphics. You should be so proud of yourself, gaming industry.

@threeunder3 If you are using your keyboard to play Civilization, you are doing it wrong.

So, they choose to talk about the obscure and unsuccessful 3DO, instead of the like much more important NES and PS1. That's a bit like making a European history with a whole chapter on Louis XVII, while not mentioning Napoleon and Bismarck.

The PC-version looks a bit better. But it's still sad to see that they can't make a bigger improvement over the consoles on the PC this late in the product cycle. The game looks essentially the same as CoD4. I bet you can still run it perfectly on full settings with 4 or 5 years old hardware. It really should not be that way on the PC.