Halpin, the Entertainment Consumers Association's president, deployed the lightning bolt with ruthlessness on fellow racers attempting to jump the gorge on the stadium track. "Like my character [Wario], I rarely hesitated in sending other racers off the cliff," Halpin answered.

Todd Howard, the executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, came up with a failsafe against his men getting mind-controlled by aliens in X-Com. Since they dropped their weapons under an alien spell, he equipped them with live grenades that, when dropped, went boom. No more mind control problem. No more soldiers, either, but that's their problem.

Of course, there's a lot of evil done in the Sims (a franchise with a capacity for cruelty unlike many others), Knights of the Old Republic, and plenty of RPGs, for that matter. One guy even gratuitously shot up all the cows in Call of Juarez. Check it out. And tell us about all the innocent people you've wasted with a headshot, down in the comments.

The Evil Things We Do [Bitmob]

The four Ubisoft titles - Beyond Good and Evil, Far Cry, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, and IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 - generally sell for $9.99 a piece, but for this weekend and this weekend only, Steam is cutting us a deal. Any one of these titles is worth the full price, so getting all four for a 10-spot is a damn good deal. Perhaps this is my weekend to finally finish playing through the original Far Cry and stop lying about it to impress the ladies.

Ubisoft Classic Pack [Steam - Thanks Mason!]

Things happen so quickly around here! You post a story about a woman needing a Wii and everyone jumps to help. Put up some images from the upcoming Resident Evil CGI movie and a couple hours later, you have a clip in your mailbox.

Kotakuite cody412 sends in a link to the above trailer that the photos from the last article were taken. Watch in horror as Resident Evil's ubiquitous zombies make their way to a DVD player near you.

Ben Fritz has an interesting column up over on Variety that points out that comparing a movie to a video game is quickly becoming a shorthand way of saying it sucks.

For today's movie critics, videogames are the new MTV musicvideo, a shorthand insult for any movie deemed too heavy on effects and visual panache at the expense of plot and coherence.

Anyone who has spent much time playing videogames — a category in which, it seems safe to assume, few established film critics fall — knows the comparison is both artistically demeaning and substantively wrong.

Fritz than launches into a defense of video games, pointing out that not all games are mindless gore-fests, sure some are, but it's absurd to bunch them all under one umbrella and about as fair as "dismissing the art of moviemaking based on "Wild Hogs.""

I think this increasingly wide-spread insult in movie reviews is mostly a product of pop culture ignorance and a sign that some movie critics are becoming increasingly detached from the mass culture they should be so versed in. Brian Crecente

300 Critics Cling to Consoles [Variety]

Whether or not the Wii succeeds will depend on one and only one factor: how many zombies you can brutally eviscerate with the Wiikatana. So earlier reports that Resident Evil would not be coming to the Wii caused many of us to immediately write the platform off completely. Duck Hunt is for fruits: let us spill the black, rotting bowels of the living dead, Nintendo!

But good news! While Resident Evil 5 won't be coming to the Wii, having been designed from the ground-up for the 360 and PS3, some other iteration will be coming, and will be called... Resident Evil Wii. Presumably, they will build this game from the ground-up to take advantage of the Wii's controller... perhaps a turn in the House of the Dead direction? Florian Eckhardt

Resident Evil Wii Not Cancelled [1UP]

I went to the movies last night and got sidetracked by a prize arcade machine in the lobby on the way out. Stacker is a deviously charming game that creates the illusion that you are a button push away from landing a choice prize like a cell phone or Nintendo DS, but in fact have little to no change of ever hitting your goal.

The game is very simplistic. There are 15 rows of blocks that light up one row at a time.

The game starts with three lit blocks in one row zooming back and forth. You just press a button to stop them. Then three more start zooming back and forth in the next row and you have to stop them on top of the first. After a few more rows, only two are lit and then only one. The object is to stack the lit boxes all the way to the top. If you make it to row 10, or so, you're given the option of some crappy-ass prize that is usually worth about 20 percent what you paid to play, or 20 cents if you're paying a dollar.

If, like just about everyone, you elect to go for the big prize, you have to stack five more boxes successfully and then you win something usually worth about $150.

According to the game's manual, the setting for the major prize can be cranked all the way up to an estimated one-in-800 payout.

I played a few times and almost always got within two of the top prize (I was shooting for a DS), but never made it. The fact that I got so close made me want to keep trying, which is the point of course. That's how these games make their money.

What's your favorite swindle machine? Brian Crecente

In a fitting comeuppance for the nexus of evil known as Starforce, Ubisoft has wiped Heroes of Might and Magic V free of the malware and won't use it in future copy protection. The bad, bad, bad anti-piracy system is pimped by Russian gangsters, so unscrupulous that they offer nay-sayers free knuckle sandwiches in some Moscow warehouse. A $5 mil class action lawsuit was brought against Ubi for using loathsome Starforce DRM in their games back in 2004 and continued to be publicly berated for using it. The company took a hint. Do we hate Starforce? Yes, and now so does Ubisoft.

More Here [CorpNews] Thanks, David!

The man behind the ultimate high score admits that his score too is driven more by the desire to boast they the desire to play.

Be honest; Do you get achievements for fun or bragging rights? I don't think anyone above 15k gets them only for fun, I mean you can't like all the games. So it's mostly for bragging right even though I don't brag that much (at least not yet). I really think the whole achievements concept is the best idea that Microsoft had since they created Xbox Live as it makes you play games you would never have tried otherwise.

I agree 100 percent, those damn Live programmers are messing with our minds.

Featured Gamer [Achieve360Points]