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The Advertising Standards Authorityhas ruledthat Change4Life’sstereotypical and stupid ad campaigncan stay. Despite infuriating the British game industry with its implication that videogames are part of the “doing nothing” that leads to premature death, the ASA sees no reason to step in. “Whilst the ASA Council understood the concerns of Tiga and those complainants who worked in the video games industry, it noted that the ad did not claim that playing computer or console games alone would lead to illness or premature death,” stated the ASA....

When I think of my favorite videogame tunes from the N64 days, the sounds of the originalBanjo-Kazooieoften fill my head. I mean, at the mere mention of “Freezeezy Peak,” I immediately hear the opening to thatworld’s song. The great thing aboutBanjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts— at least as far as soundtracks are concerned — was that it seemed to be a mishmash of fan favorite songs from the beloved first game while keeping them fresh using techniques I’m not familiar with....

I hope everyone reading this bathes on a regular basis because if not you’re really gross. Maybe you want your baths to be a bit more fun, though. What if every bath ended in you getting a newDragon Questtoy? That’s what the Dragon Quest Bath Balls will do for you. While bathing you can place one of these Slime shaped bath fizzers into your bath water and it’ll fizzle away until it reveals one of nine littleDragon Questtoys....

I had to do a double take after entering the room at a recent Activision preview event. I looked at the screen from a couch I sat on, looked back at the player who seemed to be controlling the action, and then looked again at the screen and the console beside it.Wii? If so, that’s a great looking Wii game,I thought.It actually took me walking up to the screen (about 6 ft away) to see that it was indeed a Wii game....

In ourlast BioWare story, we talked about howDragon Age: Originswill be “aggressively” grey, and how it plans to introduce a truly engaging moral choice system. I then asked Mike Laidlaw why he feels that other games have failed in their quest to bring morality into videogames, and how close we’ve come to capturing that true sense of dilemma in a game. “I think it’s difficult because the raw morality you’re presented with in a game is a very narrow slice of life, a narrow experience band,” he explains....

Stemming from asmall comment in a GameStop article, reports have been spreading thatMass EffectandDragon Agedeveloper BioWare is assisting Maxis in the development ofDarkspore. As we’ve discovered, that’s not entirely accurate. It’s just that a member of the BioWare team, writer Malcolm Azania, is the lead writer on the fiction for Maxis’ upcoming action role-playing game. Azania had previously contributed to writing forMass Effect 2, the downloadable Kasumi mission, as well as BioWare’s Facebook game,Gift of the Yeti....

Electronic Arts, People Can Fly, and Epic Games have announced that a demo for its batsh*t first-person shooter,Bulletstorm, will hit Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Network on January 25. The demo will allow players to check out a piece of the game’s “Echo” mode, a score-based mode that will have you using the game’s “Skillshot” system to top the leaderboards. You’ll have access to a number of weapons in the demo, including the Peace Maker Carbine, the Flail Gun (it fires two grenades linked together by a chain), and the Screamer, “a powerful revolver that turns enemies into human fireworks....

Talk about a great way to sell a crap load of copies of your game. According tothis adin Gamepro, if you buyCrackdownfor the Xbox 360, then you’ll get an invite to theHalo 3beta. Sneaky business practice or nothing but a handful of awesome? Either way, if this IS true,Crackdownwill get a substantial sales boost.

The new 360 trailer wouldn’t embed properly, so this is the preview trailer from last August. The footage in the two is nearly identical, though, so you’re not exactly missing anything: the only thing that really matters rightnowis that Ubisoft has officially announced thatCall of Juarezwill be hitting the 360 and the PC simultaneously this summer. It’s strange thatCoJtook so long to hit the States — it’s been out in Europe since 2006....

The wonderful people at The Behemoth received what can only be assumed to be a delightful gift this Christmas. On December 25th, the total number of users (based on leaderboards) who have playedCastle Crashersexceeded two million. That’s a lot of crashing! Okay, sure, those numbers may pale in comparison to sales ofBlack Ops.But very few games have attained this level of success on Xbox Live Arcade. Since its release in 2008,Castle Crashershas consistently remained in the Live Marketplace’s top 20 downloaded games and has the highest player rating of any title available on the service....

Civilization Vis set to get some free and premium add-on content on October 25. The freebie is the “Mongols Civilization and Scenario Pack” complete with Genghis Khan. He’ll always be close to my heart as one of the few rulers to keep my attention during history class, right up next to Extreme Action Ghandi as seen in this series. We’re also getting the “Babylonian Civilization Pack” as a $4.99 download....

NCsoft has given us five copies of the limited edition collector’sedition ofAionfor our25 days of givingcontest series. The collector’s edition comes with a 6.5″-tall figure, extra in-game items, soundtrack CD, posters and a reference card. So what do you have to do to win yourself a copy? Well every time I’ve seen anything aboutAion, I always see something with big angel-like wings. What else do you think would benefit from angel-like wings?...

[Contest closed! Winner is Mark Griffiths!] Well I can’t lie. I have become quite a fan of SteelSeriesover the last year with their lines of peripherals designed for “hardcore gamers,” and no it isn’t because of the CMO’s arms. Either way, at Eurogamer Expo this month in London I told James Dean to give me his best PR pitch for their new Xbox 360 headset, the Spectrum 4XB and 5XB....