I asked around last night and Nintendo s party and I m hearing that G4 host Tina Wood did her Nintendo press conference shilling of Nintendogs for free. I suppose this makes it a little better, but it still isn t something I think she should be doing. On the other hand, I had a ton of people telling me that she s not really a journalist, but I don t buy into that crap.

The question is, is what Wood did for free, getting on stage and pitching Nintendogs to a room filled with journalists from around the world, any worse than a reporter getting an all-expense paid trip to Sony s Game Day, where they are put up in a hotel, fed expensive meals and then are expected to write objectively about Sony s games.

Or what about just getting a game for free? Is it fair to cast stones when I, and every other gaming journalist I ve ever met or talked to, gets free games from the companies they write about?

Oh, and the hot dog-on-dog action that led to Shigeru Miyamoto asking Wood to go backstage with him so he could teach her some new tricks, was apparently not staged, or really wanted. The dogs had never done that before during rehearsal. I guess they just needed an audience. Don t I know what that s like.