"Okay, I apprehended the suspect, didn't cause any civilian casualities, and foiled a terrorist plot by careful examination of available evidence. Where the hell's my achievement?"

My gut feeling tells me that the next generation Xbox and PS is going to be more a case of evolution, not revolution, not least because both consoles have their established markets that they're loath to disappoint and the 360 and PS3 both have established business models that finally work. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the "PS4" and Xbox "720" were simply heavily based on their predecessor models with some kind of inbuilt Kinect/Move functionality, better graphics, higher processor performance and more memory. For my part though, backward compatibility will be a deal-breaker. If Sony decides to neglect PS1/PS2/PS3 compatibility with the next gen of consoles, then I'll certainly be waiting a long time to buy it. PS2 backward compatibility is certainly very important to me and I'm still seething that Sony has neglected it and is now seeking to profit from that neglect by selling me the games I already have!

Brendan, Marko and Caro have earned my respect alone by declining to include the overhyped Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 in their lists, contrary to what I would have expected. Yes, these games have sold millions, but they are still two of the worst games that have arrived on the scene this year. Sure, not all of the games in these three lists are my cup of tea - I've only played about half of them, and I couldn't quite get into Skyward Sword or Mortal Kombat, but all of them have a level of artistic and creative quality that manages to stop the gaming industry from sinking into mediocrity entirely, something which I've been fearing for the past four years or so.

And here's me thinking that GameSpot's journalistic integrity was starting to recover. Passing a glorified advertising piece for a business partner as a serious article. Great journalism. Silly me.

Computer game censorship is only a non-issue if it is performed with discretion and not with the virtual equivalent of a sledge hammer. Try living here in Germany, a country which, in spite of its claim to press and media freedom, has one of the worst censorship regimes in the Western World. Around 5-6 games are blacklisted here each month and we are left with useless versions that are usually incompatible in multiplayer, difficult to play because you can't tell whether you've hit someone (blood and ragdoll is removed), and with all dodgy political references removed. True, the situation over the past year has been seeing some distinct improvements, with Doom first taken off the blacklist, then Quake. The politicians claim it's all in the interest of "youth protection", but a fat lot of good that does. All it does is encourage kids to pirate games so they can get the originals.

It's very touching to see modders not only trying to show off their skills but also cater for the needs of people with problems such as arachnophobia as I suffer with. I usually freak uncontrollably at the sight of a spider - doubly so if one lands or climbs on me - and Skyrim's spiders are realistic enough to make me very uncomfortable when they pop up. That being said, I've decided to stick it out with the eight-legged freaks because hammering at a bear's shins is not really a pastime I'd like to engage in. It's just a matter of getting through the fight and then taking a break so that I can gather my wits again. Still, kudos to the author of the mod - in fact, to those of all the mods. I'll be giving them a proper try when I can get away from my work.

Given that the corporate puppet masters here generally compel their lapdogs in various governments here in Europe to duplicate any copyright law passed in the States, my hopes and best wishes are with those doing their best to fight this fascist bill in the States. As many people here have rightly said, it's proof enough that the US is now run behind the scenes by its most powerful corporations. Thank goodness that people are now finding it in themselves to stand up to it.

If you have an F2P model that tries to suck hundreds of euros from its users for a limited game experience, then your success will be VERY short-lived. Reputations spread like wildfire, and a reputation of kiddies misusing their parents' credit cards is the sort of rep that can kill a game. I personally think the per-game approach is a good one if the price is set at the correct level. It's an approach that maybe companies like OnLive could follow. I grew up with arcades in the 1980s and 1990s; I was OK with pumping 20-30 Pfennig into Final Fight, Wonderboy et al. because I knew I was getting an experience for my money, and if that experience was short-lived, I knew it was because of my own lack of skill. Arcades in Germany are all but dead now, but I've seen a few in the UK, and at a pound per game, they are ALWAYS empty. People tend to play fruit machines there more than the games themselves.

@rhmontg: Actually your grandparents had perfectly valid questions and obviously understand the problems of digital distribution and ultra-portable devices better than you. Rechargable batteries do only have a limited life ("cycles") before they are useless and you can't charge them anymore. In devices like MP3 players this means having to buy a new MP3 player. And the quality of MP3s/AACs is beyond a shadow of a doubt worse than a CD - not audible on a portable player, I grant you that, but certainly audible on a large sound system. Typical ramblings of an ill-informed digital distribution fanatic.

I've come to realise in recent months that the credibility of any publication posting an article entitled "Is Cloud Gaming the Future?" is seriously doubtful. GameSpot is not the first and won't be the last to fall into this trap. This is poor journalism at its worst - no critical examination of the problems of cloud gaming from a gamer's perspective (control lag, image quality, internet fallout) or the legal issues (licence ownership and termination), no addressing the problem of absurdly high bandwidth usage and the likely revolt by ISPs causing connection prices to rise massively, no examination of the massive cost of running a data centre that deals with this kind of processing power. And, last but not least, no addressing the issue of why the same promises are being regurgitated that were used for digital distribution and have never come to fruition - that devs would get more of the money when they haven't, that game prices would fall massively when they haven't, that distribution costs would "drop to zero" when it's turned out that you still always have a middleman charging commission - be it Steam, GamersGate, GOG, PSN, Microsoft or whatever - bandwidth costs to account for, and employee salaries to pay.