From Joystiq:

In a gesture of gratitude, NCsoft & Cryptic Studios are giving away 2,000 copies of the best-selling MMOG, City of Heroes, to Marines returning from duty in the Middle East. … The Navy Exchange Service Command is also offering a 10 percent discount on 60-day game cards if purchased when the free copy is picked up. “We hope they can have fun playing City of Heroes with their family and friends, and know that their challenging work has not gone unappreciated” (Robert Garriott, president of NCsoft-North America).

City of Heroes is a MMORPG that charges players a monthly fee after the first month of free play so NCSoft is essentially showing their gratitude to the returning Marines by offering the soldiers an opportunity to give the game company money on a monthly basis.

How awfully nice of them.

Stuart Walpole has a good article on Gamedev.net about designing games for folks with little gaming time. I agree wholeheartedly with his points. An excerpt:

I have better things to do than attempt the same mis-timed jump again and again: Why oh why have jumping “puzzles” not died the death they richly deserve? There’s nothing that quite kills pacing like reloading the same quicksave (or better yet, being returned to your last save point) until you beat a tedious activity through sheer trial and error.

What, exactly, is my incentive for continuing to waste my precious time in this situation?

My own incentive is I refuse to be defeated by something a six-year-old could best e.g. Super Frickin’ Mario Brothers 3.

The Bitmap Brothers were the first team of game developers whose work I actively sought out in my early computer gaming years. Their oeuvre spanned shoot-’em-ups, platform games and even sports simulations (of sorts) and each of their games invariably became a classic of the genre. Their designs held up so well their games were converted for the GBA and the Pocket PC platform in 2002. (Speedball 2 ver. GBA is my new holy grail.)

The Chaos Regime pays homage to these Motorola 68000 processor gaming gods and the articles on the site brought back a flood of memories of a time when gaming goodness could be packed into a single disk.