Whilst I agree with the general idea of your post, I note with amusement your comment "A game should be celebrated for being a game, not for compliance to an arbitrary standard that was not the norm to begin with: the one disc game". You then go on to cite the Amiga, and the multi-disc gaming experience as evidence for this.

Well, maybe I'm missing the point here, but I don't think the Amiga (or rather it's multi-disc gaming) set the standard, did it? Maybe I'm a little long in the tooth, but I do remember playing endless Nascom1, ZX80, and ZX81 tapes, but I can't for the life of me remember one single game that stemmed onto more than one tape (mostly as the games were obviously so small then). If you want to go even further, when Richard Garriott wrote Akalabeth (pre-Ultima) he had on just the one punch tape!

So, I think the "standard" here is really leaning toward the one-disc (or whatever format you desire) game.

But I do agree that it mostly stems from the idiocy and impatience of modern society (to go back to my earlier days, how many people would put up with a 5 or 10 minute load time for a game, with an even chance that game would fail to load?) now? Sadly, it doesn't seem to be just the younger generation who are guilty of this impatience - a couple of evenings of Xbox Live, say, and you're bound to come across several whiners (mostly American, sadly) whilst sat at a hub shouting "start the game, dude" after a few seconds of them joining. I digress a bit, but you get what I mean, I'm sure.

And yes, licensing costs per disc is a silly excuse, I agree, and I'm surprised developers and publishers are still using it.

To add my few penn'orth, I believe the main reasons Microsoftt aren't willing to embrace Blu-Ray is more to do with them not being able to get cost-efficient (for them) drives, particularly as they're trying to do everything to reduce console price to compete. Also, I suspect that having an extra Blu-Ray drive attached to an existing 360 console would blow up many of the existing units, as they draw an awful lot of amps, don't you know... (remember all those stories of people who bought extra fans to avoid the RROD and found that their consoles were going bang - or black - anyway?).

As I own far too many consoles than I'll readily admit to (although I will say my old original Atari VCS still works, I used it last week), I will say that with the experiences I've had with Microsoft's technical expertise (*cough*) would lead me to avoid buying an additional Blu-Ray anyway. I'd be too suspicious of them leaving of the internal disc brake of the drive anyway, leading it to scratch those discs...

Having been through a few redundancies myself, I really do empathise with the employees involved here; it's a shit situation, no doubt made worse by the economic climate generally, and it being at Christmas too.

However, I'm not too surprised. Goldeneye was great, likewise the Timesplitters series and Second Sight wasn't half-bad either.

But, what have they been doing for the last 3 years? Haze! And that is one truly awful game.

As they say, the proof's in the pudding, and I'm not surprised to hear from this Edge source that they weren't too great on their employees of late (mind you, it's sadly a rare thing for a British company to be good to their staff these days).

If you're employed by a company that is badly organised (and security-lax), and treats you like crap, then I can understand why you're not going to be very motivated to put your all into the finished product (i.e. Haze). Let's face it, even if you did manage to sift through and fix the majority of the huge number of bugs in the game, it would still have been somewhat underwhelming anyhow. Couple this with the fact that great (or even good) games on the PS3 are a little thin on the ground, then it should have been rather easy to make Haze moderately successful.

Furthermore, given that they'd had such a good pedigree of decent FPS's, it's no big surprise to me that they've ceased to be. Bearing all this mind, no amount of government funding/assistance could possibly have helped them, and indeed, I'd have been pretty annoyed (as a taxpayer) if the government had!

So, commiserations for the staff; I really do hope you all find employment, and quickly. But to the guys at the top ... well, maybe you ought to take a long, hard look at yourselves (and your work) before you go starting up afresh.

Ditto - a fantastic idea!

As a big kid who's been playing games since the Nascom1 days of the late 70s, I have an unadmirable talent of having played hours and hours of games over the years while still remaining completely bloody average on most things.

One problem I have - one which is grossly overlooked - is that I'm a disabled gamer. Although there are indeed many forms of disability, the majority are physical disabilities and I'm no exception here. I have spina bifida, albeit in a mild form, which affects my mobility, grip, and a number of other things. The upshot of this is that I have good days and bad days.

Paradoxically, the bad days - when my gaming "skills" are at their worst - are the days when I'm normally incapacitated/in bed, and I want to play games the most. So for some years, a personal bugbear of mine is the inability to be able to complete a game by being unable to drop the difficulty level down a notch. Also, it's annoyed me when you can't access some of the rarer game elements (think Resident Evil, for example) without going through the hardest difficulty mode. I do think there should be some sort of kudos for having the wherewithall to get through a tough challenge, but Gamerpoints and Trophies seem to have covered this angle now.

So, I hope that this innovation signals the start of universal employment of being able to select what difficulty level is applicable to you personally. Let's face it, some of the difficulty settings I've encountered (even on some of the better games) have been little more than a guessing game employed by developers anyhow.