There're two dangers with going too far down that route - the first is that all the bosses become more samey, since if the bosses are random it's far harder to do the fun, memorable, clever fights without completely wrong-footing the players.

And secondly, there's enormous satisfaction to be had in finally beating that boss which your little group has been struggling with for weeks. That sense of achievement was what I did it for, but if the bosses are random it's far harder to come by.

Anyway...I agree on the good 3D news. Imagine the bliss: Watching 2 different TV shows, or one TV show and one game! I can watch hockey and the Mrs can watch.. what-ever she likes. That just leaves some solution to the sound. Different headphones?

It's pretty much all console games these days and has been for the last 4-5 years I would say.

This is L4D1 experience talking but it is much more enjoyable with the director and difficulty level working properly. The AI director is supposed to give you breaks between waves, particularly if it was a wave where you took a lot of damage/knock downs. Also the difficulty levels did work for me and it was a lot of fun to see my little static group of 4 work our way from struggling on medium, to breezing through medium, to struggling with hard, to doing pretty well on hard. If they ever get it working right you should give it another go.

On the subject of un-winable random fights I will acknowledge that it is frustrating to be blindsided and overwhelmed, but it is an amazing feeling when you get hit with something big and manage to just barely scrape by with your fingernails. It's the difficulty and the failure that makes the success remarkable and memorable, at least for me. Tim just might be a different type of gamer than me.

As far as applying this to MMO's my favorite WoW raid boss of all time is still Moroes from the burning crusade expansion. He appeared with 4 named minions drawn from a possible pool of 6. The minions had significantly different powers that each other, so the necessary strategy was also different. It lead to something that has never happened before or since in WoW. My raid group would actually stop and strategize on how our group of 10 would tank, crowd control and/or burn down this group of 5. Nobody recited canned strategies, asked why the noobs hadn't watched the fight on YouTube, or spammed gogogogogo in chat. It was a rare and shinning moment in the history of the game made possible by a measly two extra NPCs that didn't appear and 15 possible combinations for the fight. To my knowledge Blizzard hasn't done anything like that since.

I tried the first one, on the XBOX, and found just like VH that it was a pain being effective. In my case it probably comes down to my ineptitude with the controllers.