Ask and ye shall receive
Cool, a GPS attachment for the GBA! Time to get going on those location enabled games. Also, make it smaller, please.
New Game, Old Methods
I haven't bought City of Heroes yet, though I'm likely to pick it up at some point. The only thing holding me back at this point is that I'm completely ticked off at the distribution model of the game. Why must I walk to the damn store, and pay fifty bucks for the damn game? I'm supposed to shell out $15 a month to play the dang thing, why must I pay for the crappy cardboard box? Just let me download it, dammit! I'm going to sign up, forget that they're charging me, just like they expect a significant fraction of their user base to do, and they'll make stupid amounts of money by automatically debiting the accounts of thousands of forgetful geeks. Nailing me for an extra $18 bucks or so after the COGs and retail markup is accounted for is just annoying. It's the game equivalent of a cop who breaks his baton on your kneecap and sends you the bill for a new one.
Developers stuck in bad funding deals with publishers are trapped into this model, and it's possible that Cryptic wound up in that trap, but the publisher is NCSoft! I would have expected them to be a little more forward-looking, given that they have nearly infinite cash from running Lineage in Korea. They know that all the juice from running one of these things comes on the backend, and they have all of the infrastructure in place to completely sidestep the normal distribution channel. You know that there had to be people agitating to distribute online, but were overruled by the suits. Sigh.