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Let every man, woman, and child know of the threat ofcasual games. They’re infecting our schools and our consoles! Children sit in between classes and playCooking MamaandPhoenix Wright. Pretty soon, our children will be betraying us by spending time playing those despicable casual games and leave the purity that encompasses games likeGears of WarandGrand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Or at least, this is how some gamers react to the mere mention of casual games....

Not only was Insomniac’s PlayStation 3 first-person shooterResistance: Fall of Mana pretty good game, but it also sold a few copies. It’s silly to think that the folks at Insomniac are sitting on their hands after having finished work onRatchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Surfer Girl hasalready droppeda fair amount of (rumored) information on the sequel to Resistance. Whether or not that information pans out as truth remains to be seen, but here’s a solid fact: Sony Computer Entertainment of America filed fortrademarkof “Resistance 2” on December 18....

If you’re anything like I am, you’re a sucker for any game that lets you take on the role of a sweaty dude and touch other sweaty dudes … wait a minute! That’s not like me at all! I do, however, have a soft spot for brawlers of the squared-circle variety, despite the fact that I haven’t watched professional wrestling programming in at least seven years (not counting the year I spent in the hospital after I leg dropped my cat through a folding table)....

The above video is the winnerof theXbox Live Originalscontest, a showcase for the finest in whatever the hell that thing up there is. Microsoft was offering entrants a chance for a $100,000 budget and a six episode run of downloadable shows on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and the above clip — entitleBouchedags— beat out a field that must have consisted of video clips of women stomping kittens to death and the atrocities comitted during the Rape of Nanking....

Monolith havefinally narrowed downthe finalists in their “Name Your Fear” contest, in which fans were asked to submit names for the upcoming sequel to F.E.A.R., their successful first-person shooter. After intense labor that included “filtering out ridiculous, inappropriate and duplicate entries,” the team have chosen three entries, all of which simply fall into the ridiculous category. “Dead Echo,” “Project Origin,” and “Dark Signal” have come out on top, and Monolith are more than happy to tell you (in detail) why they were chosen....

WhenDiablocame out, I remember being fascinated by its randomly generated dungeons. “Surely,” I said, unwisely, “I’ll eventually run across a map I’ve seen before.” Oh, how gloriously, wonderfully wrong I was! Over a decade later, the fine folks at Gearbox Software decided that maybe Blizzard had been onto something back in 1996, and that “thousands of unique, randomly generated missions, weapons and situations” would be pretty rad. And thus*,Borderlandswas born....

Nintendo president-face Satoru Iwata has stated that the3DS Mii Plazawill be updated with fresh features by the end of the year. By that, I hope he doesn’t mean, “There will be more Mario hats.” The Mii Plaza is currently home to some good, but ultimately half-finished, ideas. You can play two little games with the Mii characters, but they’re extremely limited in scope, barely interactive, and generally pointless. Also, once you’ve played with all the Miis you’ve collected via Streetpass a single time, they cannot be used again — unless you get a second Streetpass download....

What do you get when you take Pandora’s music streaming concept and replace it with just videogame music? You get 8-bit FM!8-bit FMis a streaming videogame music station that plays everything from videogame soundtracks, remixes, Nerdcore and Chiptunes. Music is streamed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As I write this, the Yo’ster’s Island theme fromSuper Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Starscame on followed by the Aquatic Ambiance theme fromDonkey Kong Country....

Evil publisher Activision may know how to make vast sums of money, but it doesn’t seem to know when someone’s yanking its chain.Edgy Gamerwrote a rather amusing email to Activision, talking about a “glitch” inModern Warfare 2‘s “No Russian” level where the enemy characters are rendered without guns and won’t fight back. Rather than understand the joke, Activision took it seriously! “Every time I get up to Act 1, Mission 4, the game appears to load fine at first, but then when I encounter the enemies, I discover that nearly of them are rendered without weapons,” write the cheeky pranksters....

www.amazon.com/playstationnetworkis a real thing. Sony and Amazon have partnered up to bring you PlayStation Network titles away from the PlayStation Store. Over 200 PS3 and PSP titles are available now. This all works through digital access codes, meaning that customers will be buying these codes on Amazon.com. Amazon customers will get this code immediately after purchase, and it will be stored in that customer’s Your Games & Software Library. They will then redeem the code on their PS3 or PSP....

Amazon has a pretty kick-ass pre-order deal for Valve’s highly anticipated April 19th release,Portal 2, right now. If you place an order now you’ll get the game plus a $20 Amazon credit, all for the price of $54.99. That’s $5 of the list price, plus free spending money! The deal is good for PS3, PC and Xbox 360, but it seems they’re having trouble with the PS3 pre-orders.Amazon’s Twittersays that they’re working to get it fixed now....

I’m not going to turn into pretentious retro RPG guy here. The new ones are better than the old ones in my book. But it’s nice to jump back into an old RPG just like it is to pick up an old novel that you haven’t read in ages. I did that recently with PlayStation classic RPGWild ARMsand was very happy that I did. I forgot how great that game was....

Chibi-faced renditions of timeless videogame icons may always be super-kawaii, but frankly the cute overload factor just isn’t enough in this day and age to distinguish onechoadsized Link from the next. While sixteen year old~RDCarneirofrom Brazil could have easily trapped himself within that particular scope of fan art, his steady-handed cartooning and clever sense of humor sets him apart from his teenage colleagues. Sometimes portraying game characters’ lives outside the game and often combining gaming personalities for chuckle-worthy results, ~RDCarneiro’s extensivecomic galleryeffectively entertains through a well-versed understanding of gaming humor....