Dead Space 2: Multiplayer, Bigger World, Space-Floating
This could be both fun and nauseating!

Ever Wonder How Much Money Has Been Sunk Into America's Army?
You don't want to know.

Five Steps to Total Pwnage of a Gamer Girl's Heart
In case you didn't have the attention span to take all 10 prerequisite steps.

Xbox 360 Game Helps You Talk To Girls
No it doesn't.

Pokemon Teaches Your Children To Worship Satan
No no, Pokemon IS Satan.

Blizzard Patches Diablo II, Beta Test It Now
My old discs are about 5 feet away...

PlayStation Home Director Wants "Mini-MMOs" On The Service
Interesting idea.

Frankenreview: The Legend Of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
Spoiler: the reviews deem it excellent.

EA CEO: "I Think Of Pirates As A Marketplace"
A marketplace that's just been robbed.

"I hate sports games," Kristen says with a weary laugh, reminding me for about the fifth time this Thursday night "I had to ask someone what a sack was. They said it's when you tackle the quarterback. I said, 'Which one is the quarterback?'"

Only in name are Kristen and I playing Madden NFL Arcade. Instead we are "boosting," - throwing games to each other, more or less, to rack up multiplayer achievements. I've already gotten 50 points the easy way. Now it's her turn.

It is a substantial part of how Kristen, whose last name I'm withholding out of concern for her privacy, has become, according to one leading compilation, the No. 4 ranking woman, worldwide, in Gamerscore. Her tag is CRU x360a - go ahead, look it up. Kristen - CRU or Crubie to some online - is a 24-year-old stay-at-home mom in northwest Indiana. You call her extremely motivated. You can call her obsessed. You can also call her an achievement whore, like she hasn't heard that from every piss-ant with a 5,000 gamerscore in the underground zone.

Bottom line, she's is really effective at piling up her gamerscore. But she's not sure when, or if, she will stop.

A Race to the Top

"It was a friendly race at the time," Kristen says of the beginning, three years ago, when she got serious about her Gamerscore. "It was to 20,000. My buddy was at 15,000 and I was at 13, I was 2,000 behind him. I said, 'OK, this might take years.'

Kristen had bought an Xbox 360 in early 2007 and, like most, it wasn't because it offered achievements. She was a multiplayer gamer on a few titles she enjoyed - shooters mostly. Then she joined a Gamerscore league. And then she got into this side bet.

"Once I found sites that had guides on which were the easy games, I beat (20,000) in like a month and a half," she says. "It got me hooked and it was like a drug. A bad drug. A bad habit."

Soon enough Kristen managed to fall in with some elite players in the achievement grinding world. One, named Smrnov, who is the global No. 10 on MyGamerCard, praises Kristen's team-spirited achievement hunting. "CRU was unselfish in the help she offered our team, and has always been reliable for getting the game time in, which is a very hard trait to find for spanning so many different games, versus a single one," he says.

Stallion83, the global No. 2 on that list, played with Kristen in those early days, and was most recently her boosting partner on Damnation - a terribly received game. ("We managed to have fun talking about The Leprechaun movies," he says. "Party chat has made some of these games less painful.")

"She was just a nice person," Stallion83 recalls,"like one of the dudes. Most girls cause drama and try to get attention. I didn't see that with CRU." Both he and Smrnov heap praise on Kristen's FPS skill. "A great FPS player," says Smrnov. "In addition, she's very good about figuring out the best strategy for completing a game quickly and doing all associated research. She has both gaming skills and gamerscore skills."

But that doesn't keep Kristen from going after the kids' stuff, too. Last week, Spongebob: Truth or Square put her over 165,000. It's a cute detail but it barely scratches the surface of Kristen's performance over the past three years. Nor does the four-game Gamefly subscription, in constant rotation. That's to be expected. And the shelf full of games, many of them years old and still waiting to be played, well, what would you consider impressive? A hundred and sixty?

She bought Jumper: Griffin's Story - one of the worst reviewed games ever in Xbox 360 history. The day Modern Warfare 2 was released, she spent all her time on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. American Idol? She put the microphone in front of a speaker and played songs into it to ace the performances that much faster. It didn't work for Sing It: High School Musical or Hannah Montana, so, she had to belt those out herself.

"They're easy enough songs; It's not bad, there's no one looking at me while I'm playing it," Kristen says, "but my friends (on Xbox Live) see it, and all the guys can't believe I'm playing that game."

Remember that deal a few months back, when a someone tried to round up a 1,000 players to log in to NBA Live 07 and get the 100 gamerscore achievement for 1,000 players being online at the same time? Kristen was a part of that, with two versions of the game, one she had to go out and find for $3 at a game store, and the other playing on her Japanese 360.

Yes, she has an NTSC: J console. Kristen got that to play BioShock's Korean version, which has a separate achievement list. She's gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. She's gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand in Japanese. "I haven't even opened the Saint's Row 2 Japanese version, or the Saint's Row 1 for that matter," Kristen says. She's eyeballing a PAL console, but even an Arcade will be close to $300 with shipping and, "Do I really need to play BioShock again?"

Some of the region-locked Japanese games she plays are bought by pooling money with Stallion83, Smrnov and others in the ultra-gamerscore crowd, and the group then trades the discs around by mail. One game, Clannad, was picked for its low-hanging fruit. It's a "visual novel," sometimes called a dating sim, but as the choices are all text-based the gameplay should be pretty easy, right?

"It's a text game, and you have to choose A or B, you only have these text options," Kristen said. "But I'm sitting there on Google Translate trying to translate these strategy guides and match up (Japanese) characters to make my choices. And I'm thinking 'Why the hell did I buy a Japanese Xbox and this game, this is just retarded.' It's so embarrassing trying to match characters to a language I don't even know. I've spent $400 on a game I can't even read."

It makes me wonder. These are called games. And technically, she's playing them. But is this even fun? Is this ever fun?

"I definitely play more games I don't enjoy than games I do," she says. "Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don't enjoy."

Kristen's husband doesn't even know why she sticks with it, if something like CSI: Hard Evidence is so unfulfilling for her to play.

"Sometimes I'll be playing, and he'll ask, 'Did I have to buy that or did someone else buy it?'" Kristen says. "And I'm like, 'Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie to you?' And he walks away, saying 'I can't believe you're playing that.' To me that's more embarrassing than playing Disney: Sing It."

A Mother's Work

Kristen is careful to remind me that she does have a life outside of gaming. "I'm an avid paintball player; I have my own gun, although that's also another expensive hobby," she says. "But yeah, I'd much rather go out to a bar, go bowling, play darts or pool than sit at home and boost games all night. I'm still young."

She's also the mother of a six-year-old girl. You can do the math there, it means Kristen became a mom at age 18. Before then, she was a rather typical kid, if a little tomboyish, and absolutely delighted by video games. Kristen says she's played them since she was five. When she lived with her parents, new games and new consoles were common, especially around the holidays. When she had her daughter and moved out of the home, her original Xbox and her beloved NES - which she still has even though it won't work - stayed behind. The Xbox 360 she bought a little more than three years ago marked her re-entry to games since having her daughter.

Sometimes mother and daughter play - Spongebob was one such example. But Kristen had to load up one of the five other gamertags she keeps on the console for family and friends to play. Boosting games might sound out of bounds to some gamers, but it's entirely within the ultra-gamerscore ethos. What isn't, however, is having anyone get an achievement for you. Even your six-year-old girl.

"She climbed up and said, 'Let me play,' so I said, 'Just a second,' and put her up with another (gamertag) and let her play," Kristen says. "Sometimes she'll say 'Look, Mom, I got an achievement too!' She gets excited."

This isn't something Kristen wants to encourage. "I don't want her to get addicted like I am though," Kristen says. "She doesn't really see me play too much, actually."

Her husband, Jeff, doesn't game much at all himself. He owns a towing business that provides a comfortable lifestyle and accommodates both his interests and Kristen's gaming. He's rather mellow about all the time she spends with games, if not the money, and keeps both in perspective. Some guys have wives who spend a ton of money on clothes, or dislike spending as much time around the house as she does.

"I have some hobbies myself that are fairly pricey and I can't really blame her for that," Jeff says. "However, occasionally a string of new games will come out within a two day span and magically a few hundred dollars will be missing from the bank account. With as much time as she has allotted for video games and the kid I can account for her whereabouts at any given moment so I'm certain that she isn't cheating on me."

Even pressed for a ballpark estimate, Kristen doesn't know how much her obsession with Gamerscore has cost in the preceding three years. "My pro system is $250, my Japanese console cost $400, the hard drive I put on it was $50 - I don't want to see the number, and I'm sure Jeff doesn't want to see it," she says. "But I think it would be cool to know."

There's another number about which she seems even less enthusiastic, though. And that's the next big milestone for her gamerscore.

Calling It a Career

Two hundred thousand. According to MyGamerCard, only one other woman has a total that high (with a second very close to reaching it.) And yet when Kristen brings it up, it's with a tone of voice that ponders what she will do then. It's almost like she doesn't want to get there, for what it will force her to consider.

The simplest answer is by far easier said than done: Just quit. "I keep saying when I get 200,000 gamerscore, I'm going to retire," Kristen says. "There are people who do that. I say it now, but I don't think you can ever actually quit. It's like a drug. It is addicting."

And she uses that word often enough that I figure I should bring up the subject. Carefully. I would never say video game addiction isn't real, knowing that real people do indeed battle it. I also believe it's a topic given to alarmism. And I'm not a psychiatrist, so it's not my place to go diagnosing other people's behavior. But I ask Kristen anyway. Maybe, has she ever considered talking to someone about her gaming?

"I wouldn't say I need to talk to someone," Kristen says after considering the question for a long moment. "I'm not hurting someone by doing this. My family life is not being hurt. Granted, it's like an addiction, but I'm not hurting anyone. Well, I'm getting little sleep sometimes, but that's on me.

"Besides, I saw where someone had gone to be treated at a rehab center for video games, and it was something like $30,000 a year, and I thought, 'Do you know how many Xboxes and games I could buy with this?'" she says, without a trace of irony. "I don't think so."

When Kristen is most at ease with her gamerscore is when it describes how she's good at something. How she's figured out a way to beat the system; or how she's actually put in the time to get the "General" achievement in Call of Duty 3 - getting 40,000 points in ranked matches - to collect a rare 100+ gamerscore achievement.

"It's very much a personal pride thing, being ranked in the top five in the world in something, whether it's gaming or the fact I'm a female gamer," Kristen says. "I'm never going to be in the Olympics, so I'll be a great gamer. It's something I know I'm good at."

But I hope when she breaks 200,000 she can put the controller down. She spent the first three years of her adulthood being a mom. I suggest to Kristen that, maybe, she's spent the last three in front of a console, trying to get some of that lost time back.

Kristen ponders this, and seems to agree. "Maybe," she says.

Maybe then she can call it even.

According to a recent poll (results above/translation below) of Japanese children 12 and under, they really want...

1. Video game software (over 450 kids said this)
2. Pretty Cure goods (over 100 kids said this)
3. Anpanman goods
4. Books (picture book, book, illustrated encyclopedia)
5. Kamen Rider goods
6. Bicycle
7. Toy car
8. Clothes
9. Stuffed animal
10. Video game console

Since many kids have consoles, they just want video games now—that's fair. But clothes? What self-respecting child under 13 wants clothes?? And have you actually ever seen a picture of Anpanman?

As translated by the esteemed Brian Ashcraft over at Kotaku. [はちま起稿 via Kotaku]

Real Girlfriend Gallery of Horrors
Serves those pervs right.

What's In The Star Trek Online Collector's Edition?
If there's no Picard Maneuver, count me out.

Star Trek Online "Belly Of The Beast" Trailer Contains No Bellies Or Beasts
Still good though!

Star in Your Own N64 Freakout Kid Video
Just when we thought the N64 kid was done, he pulls us back in.

Mass Effect 2 Expands To 2 Discs, Sometimes 3
Cannot wait.

Mass Effect 2's New Blue Girl Kicks Ass
Cannot wait.

Split/Second Trailer Is About The Only Thing Not Exploding
It's like Burnout crossed with 2012.

Scandal or No, EA Sports Stands by Its Man
EA does not care who Tiger Woods sleeps with as long as he's in bed with EA.

DSi XL Makes Jubblie Bouncing Extra Large [Slightly NSFW]
It was bound to happen.

Quite simply, castration anxiety is a theory proposed by Freud in which a boy sees a girl's genitalia (or lack of penis) as a symbol of punishment, as if she's been castrated.

In this particular instance, I'd argue that the console becomes the phallus in a symbolic castration. Man plays video games. Woman does not. And when the video-game-less female destroys the male's video games, that's akin to a woman removing a man's manhood. It just so happens that, in this metaphor, man has both a literal phallus and a gaming phallus. Really, an analog like a guy tossing his girlfriend's makeup collection out the window could work just as well.

But why the fixation? Why can't we look away? Like a thought scab that our brains can't help but pick, male philosophers and writers have been obsessed with castration probably since the the beginning of time itself. A notable example would be Ernest Hemingway, as outlined by the famous literary criticism Freud, Fetishism and Hemingway's Phallic Women. For instance, in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes (through character), "Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk."

It just so happens, the ladies of YouTube aren't generally as eloquent, but they do tend to show more cleave. [Ripten via Kotaku]

Joining the ranks of SCTV, Vancouver's lax pot laws and universal health care in the short list of things Canucks can brag about, this new bundle comes with a 360 Elite, two controllers, Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST. This will set you back CAD$400, or $380 in USA dollars. It's for sale now, but much like the popularity of hockey, this deal won't last for long, so hop on it if you're going to. [Kotaku]

Price

$250 with mixamp needed to combine chatting and surround sound.

Verdict

I still vastly prefer the convenience of Turtle Beach's wireless X41 headset, but I have to admit, the Astro A40 sounds better.
Playing Borderlands, everything from the growls of skaggs to the cadence of machine gun fire sounded richer and rounder on the A40s than my X41s. Maybe the sounds weren't always as distinct, but especially when cranking the volume on each headset, I realized the general listenability—the whole package of sound—was more pleasant with Atro's product, making me long for hearing loss. It's a difference in mid range that, while not absolutely Earth-shattering, will probably be noticeable to most in a side-by-side test.

Both headsets have extremely similar sound localization. And chatting, on both, is an equal joy.

But there's one, huge, horrible, despicable Achilles' heel to the Astro A40s. To connect the headset to an Xbox 360 (or PS3/PC), wires will invade your entire living room because the console needs to plug twice into a mixamp (the big, retro box you see in the lead photo), then the mixamp connects your headphones and controller. That's confusing, I know. Here's the full workflow:

Xbox 360 optical out and USB cord => A40 Mixamp => Headphones/Mic and Xbox 360 controller.
Ultimately, not only are you negotiating four wires for this one headset, but you'll still be tethered close to your console because of one, generally short/inflexible wire: the optical cord from your Xbox to the Mixamp (you can always opt for stereo plugs, but that sort of spoils the fun).

So while I knew the A40s sounded a bit better than my X41s, I couldn't kick back and enjoy the game in the same way. For one long cord or tight quarters PC gaming, I might opt for the A40s. For four cords sprawled across my living room, I'm sticking with the X41s—especially since they're $50+ less.

Maybe you'll feel differently.

Excellent sound

Headphones work with any 3.5mm source, too

Wiring gets obnoxious

The Xbox Elegant Edition, though born an orphan, need but look in the mirror to find his parents. But just because you know where home is doesn't mean you can go there.*

* Some details of this story were altered for dramatic purposes. The Xbox Elegant Edition is really just a mod by Sweden design group Industri Repro. It' s an Xbox, reboxed with more fans and stuff. And it sounds like you could write them and maybe even buy and XBEE of your own. [IndustrirePro via techabob]

The Price

$100ish (cheaper at retail)

The Verdict

If you upgrade to the new Xbox 360 Wireless Adapter from the old, 802.11g version, you won't notice any difference while gaming. But media streaming over your home network will see a legitimate speed increase.

For a moment, let's ignore Microsoft's traditionally ridiculous price for their Xbox 360 Wi-Fi adapters. Instead, let's just focus on performance.

Upgrading from 802.11g networking to 802.11n has a few key advantages: range is longer, speeds are faster and, since 802.11n sits on the 5GHz band, you won't interfere as much with 2.4GHz frequencies used by 802.11g and basically everything else in existence.

But there's one big thing that stops 802.11n from being any better than 802.11g for gaming: latency. Overall throughput may be faster on 802.11n (the pipe is bigger), but latency is really no less present than on 802.11g (it takes just as long for that first burst of water to come through). So those quick gaming commands aren't faster on n, and my multiplayer testing (Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands...it was a real chore) confirmed it. Then again, I didn't really notice any lag over my 802.11g adapter to begin with.

Media streaming, however, is where those big throughputs pay off. Using Connect360, I streamed HD episodes of Mad Men from my Mac to the Xbox. I timed from the moment I hit play to to the first frame of video playback. And the difference was noticeable.
Buffering occurred between 2 and 3x faster, which was well beyond my expectations, despite how fast 802.11n is on a spec sheet. Clips went from taking as many as 15 seconds to playing (rounding up) to actually breaking the 5 second barrier. I'd love to have tested 1080P streaming over Live as well, but my DSL is the bottleneck in that scenario.

Yes, the Xbox 360 Wireless Adapter is still profanely expensive. No, if you have an older adapter (or you're just using some other solution), I wouldn't recommend the upgrade (nor do I think Microsoft is even marketing it that way). But it's nice to see a tangible improvement all the same.

Streams intra network media between 2 and 3x faster

Tiny formfactor still unique to the industry

No perceivable speed increases gaming

It's $100.

Costs half the price of a new 360

It'll set you back a month of dinners at McDonalds

I don't even want to think about what that is in White Castles

Datel maintains that Microsoft is "disabling or erecting technological barriers to Datel accessories" and thereby favoring its own products. For reference, Microsoft's 512MB memory unit is about $30, while a 2GB version from Datel is $40. Sounds like it might be worth supporting the little guy in this one. [Techflash]

Sorry about the previous typo, it's 512MB for $30 on the Microsoft memory unit, not 12MB.

The kid hung up mid-call, but officers went to his house and told him to listen to his parents. They didn't ask why the little shit was in trouble in the first place, but I'm pretty sure annoying emergency services won't get him back to MW2 any faster.

At least he didn't go crazy like that Japanese guy who doused himself with kerosene and torched his house after his mom threw away his Gundam action figures. [Chicago Tribune via Obscure Store]

Here's what Texas-based law firm AbingtonIP says to justify their new suit:

Although modification of Xbox consoles is arguably against the terms of use for Xbox/Xbox Live, Microsoft 'conveniently' timed the Xbox console ban to coincide with the release of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game and less than two months after the release of the very popular Halo 3: ODST game.

I'm not sure that modding consoles is "arguably" against the terms of use; it is against the terms of use. And why wouldn't they want to keep people from pirating their biggest game of the year?

Certainly, anyone who is banned who hasn't modded their console has a legitimate bone to pick with Microsoft, and there's no defending their heavy-handed banning tactics and their collateral damage. But to suggest they're intentionally banning legit accounts in order to get people to sign up again, well, that's pretty stupid. [TG Daily via Engadget]

The Price

$180 (technically $200, but Amazon sells 'em cheaper)

The History

Read our X4 review if you've never heard of these products before. This article will make a lot more sense.

The Improvements

• 2.4GHz RF instead of IR audio transmission
• USB powered instead of wall jack
• Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound instead of Dolby 5.1

I was skeptical that the Ear Force X41 would be any better than the Ear Force X4. But after using the headset for a week, I'm remiss to return to the X4s I bought last year.

Quite simply, the audio is more consistently clear with the new RF transmission, now that line-of-site and ambient light has become a non-factor. And I think that overall audio quality, while the speaker components themselves remain unchanged, has seen a bump because of this cleaner signal. (For those concerned, I was able to use the headset without interfering with my Xbox's Wi-Fi adapter or my home network—the primary potential hiccup with using RF instead of IR. Results may vary, I'm sure.)

As for the jump from Dolby 5.1 to 7.1 support, you probably won't ever notice. Playing Modern Warfare 2, missiles fly by your head with impressive panning, but the sound localization is no better than it was in the X4s...though to be fair, that's not necessarily a knock, even if the audio lacks the shining moments you'll enjoy in the best surround sound headphones offered by companies like Sony.
Oh, and the headset still requires AAAs as opposed to bundling a rechargeable lithium ion. I will say, however, that the batteries I tested with have broken the 10-hour barrier by a decent margin, and they're still operational.

As a wireless, surround sound headset for the Xbox 360, the X41 is at the top of its class (at least partially because it's still the only product in its class). If you're willing to go wired, you can save about $100+ on a cheaper version of the Ear Force, or you can take a look at the even more expensive but lauded Astro A40s.

In fact, if you guys are interested, let me know in the comments. I may try to call in a pair of those Astros in to hear for myself. [Turtle Beach]

Comfortable

Superb chat quality

RF offers smooth audio transmission

Highly specialized but useful product

Overall audio quality is OK, not stellar

AAA batteries? C'mon!

The update should propagate sometime today—UPDATE: It's live!—but if your Xbox hasn't given you the good news yet, here's what you're in for:

•Facebook – Update your status to share what movie, game or entertainment you're enjoying, connect with friends and view their Facebook stream, status updates and photos on the big screen – all seamlessly integrated and custom-built for Xbox 360. You can even compare your Xbox LIVE and Facebook friends lists to see which of your friends are on LIVE.
• Zune – Zune video on Xbox LIVE offers a full fidelity experience with instant on HD in 1080p and 5.1 channel surround sound. No waiting for downloads or buffering, it's there at the press of a button. You can also share the experience with up to seven friends through voice chat and Avatar integration on the TV screen – it puts a whole new spin on "movie night."
• Twitter – Stay in the know by discovering, posting and replying to Tweets right on your Xbox 360. You can even view friend profiles, trends and conversations, or search to see who's tweeting about your favorite game.
• Last.fm – Discover more music and explore endless personalized radio stations with Last.fm on Xbox 360. Skip, "ban" or "love" tracks to create your perfect mix-we've even built in "Gamer Stations" with game-related types of music selected specifically for the gaming community (Available in the U.S. and UK)

In addition to these social features, Xbox LIVE will also be debuting "News and More," a new section of the "Inside Xbox" channel, transforming Xbox LIVE into a full-fledged media portal. With a regularly-updated stream of content from MSNBC, The New Yorker and Dilbert, "News and More" brings the latest in current events, arts and entertainment right to your fingertips.

Analysts Talk Apple Tablet, Make Ever More Predictions

CNN Money rounded up a bunch of analysts to basically talk about how great the Apple Tablet is, how it's going to cure cancer and save the publishing industry and keep your girlfriend from leaving you, and it's mostly a rehash of what we've already heard before with a dash of a few inane statements that are almost certainly not true. Check this one:

The device will come in several different models that offer varieties of Internet connections, such as Wi-Fi or 3G, perhaps through a contract with AT&T.

Oh, really? Several different models, with varying internet connections? That sure sounds like Apple—they love confusing lineups that differ by virtue of technical specifications that only tech dorks like you and I understand.

Otherwise, nothing to see here, just more analyst talk. When something solid on the Apple Tablet leaks out, you'll know—and it ain't to be found in this article, which is why it lands, with a distinct PLOOP sound, into Remainders. [CNN]

Mad Catz Brings Cheaper Xbox 360 Wi-Fi Adapter, Still About $50 Too Expensive

I just got an Xbox 360 this weekend, and somehow did not realize that not only does the console not ship with included Wi-Fi, but an external Wi-Fi adapter costs about as much as my drinking budget for the month—in other words, way too much money. Luckily Microsoft's first-party adapter isn't the only game in town anymore: Mad Catz is entering the ring with an adapter of their own. Great news, right? Except not really, because while the Mad Catz adapter is $20 cheaper than Microsoft's that's still an $80 pricetag on an item that should be included in the first place. This thing should cost $30 at the most, not half the price of the console. It's in Remainders for that very reason: Yeah, it's a price cut, but it's still way too damned expensive. [Engadget]

Sony Reader Firmware Upgrade Is Surprisingly Difficult

The Sony Reader PRS-500 may not have the cachet of the Kindles and Nooks of the world, but Sony did just release an upgraded firmware supporting the soon-to-be-standard ePub format. Except I guess the upgrade is seriously difficult, because instead of, you know, pressing a button, like every other firmware upgrade for every other gadget in the history of the world, you have to mail the Reader back to Sony to get this one updated. What? Well, Sony's got an offer in case you find that as silly as I do: A trade-in program that gives you either $50 or $75 off the purchase of one of Sony's brand-new readers! Eesh, Sony. At least take us out to dinner before trying to screw us with our pants on. [Engadget]

B&N Giftcards Will Work for Nook Ebook Purchases, Soon

Remember when we reported that Barnes & Noble's popular giftcards would, for some unknown reason, not be allowed to be spent on ebook purchases? Well, our reporting did its job, and B&N has decided to change its ways and allow ebook giftcard purchases starting in mid-December. We did it, people! High fives and ass-slaps all around! [Barnes & Noble]

First you'll need to get iXtreme LT, which'll attempt to return your console to a playable state. The catch is that you need to know your CPU code and that the instructions rely on a lot of different (free) tools.

Has anyone used this or another workaround to get their Xbox playing again? [DailyTech via Crunchgear]

The game, which hits in Japan on Dec. 17, will include a new battle system, a "dramatic story" focused on the emotions of the character and will feature a Leona Lewis single as the game's opening theme.

Also, holy crap, are you looking at this video? Because it's spectacular. The video also gives us a better look at the game's Paradigm system.

You may want to watch this video full-screen, just click on that button in the bottom right corner.