WalkingTiger

I personally find humor in the fact that in some games for most-often the PS3, these large "hard-drive installs" are the norm, which means that even though we have these new games on these huge storage mediums, in a way, the mentality of "cartridges" lives on, even though people don't realize it... ~WalkingTiger

Very true:) Sega ultimately suffered, I think, from a lack of firm direction in that era, bolting on addons to the Genesis to keep prolonging it's life rather than moving in the direction of a completely new system; It produced some great games, but I can't help but think they would have probably saved some costs if they had spent the time developing CD & 32X instead on developing a different system with ground-up architecture from the beginning:)

I believe only the final releases of the Dreamcast hardware implemented some copy protection schemes, which unfortunately for Sega, was too little, too late; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast may have some further details on the hardware/software revisions that did or did not have such protection at the time; ~WalkingTiger

In-game ads aren't terrible when they're appropriate; I wouldn't mind seeing, for example, a huge pepsi billboard in Rainbow Six, Vegas, as it seems more realistic in a city setting like that, or even things like a pepsi ad in a Grand Theft Auto game, since those games are loosely based on real life (though that's treading the dangerous line where the anti-game fanatics would preach about how it's too close to real life with RL product placement in it)... Hopefully, however, we won't ever see ads where they are *not* appropriate... A Burger King sign in God of War, or a Mountain Dew potion in Elder Scrolls would be horrific, for example; I can't imagine any kind of advertising revenue a company could stand to gain that's worth that kind of debacle... ~WalkingTiger

Just picked up Lost Winds (Beautiful music!), Star Soldier R, and Metroid Prime 3, myself! I'm loving Metroid Prime 3, even though it isn't quite "new" now:) I'm still waiting on enough spare cash to pick up Mario Galaxy! ~WalkingTiger