Only 7,000 more than last year’s 61,000, meaning it’s probably peaked, but that’s a good healthy number for an “indie” show like PAX.

Also, it’s disingenuous to compare PAX Prime or East to E3, but damn! Still impressive stuff.

Dead Space 2 and Mass Effect 3 were potential no-brainer purchases for me. Now? Not so much.

In short, Project Ten Dollar was designed to reward people for buying new games. Online Pass is designed to punish people for buying second-hand games. That’s a subtle but extremely important difference in approach. [...] Online Pass also raises a number of awkward questions both for EA and for the console platform holders. For example, is it now reasonable to expect that EA Sports games will have significantly longer life-spans than previously? [...] Additionally, what’s the status of Xbox Live Gold in this arrangement? EA Sports boss Peter Moore was in the hot seat at Microsoft when the company launched the Xbox Live Gold and Silver service tiers, so he knows perfectly well that Xbox 360 gamers already pay a monthly fee to Microsoft to play online. The understanding was always that games which charged an additional levy (such as MMORPGs) would be accessible to Silver members – you wouldn’t have to pay twice. So will EA Sports games, with their paid-for online service, now be available to Silver customers? Or are customers to reach into their pockets twice, once for Microsoft and once for EA, simply to play a game of football against a friend in another city?

Fuck EA.

Sony talked about enticing Wii gamers to the PS3 fold with their new PlayStation Move accessory. I immediately saw this happening:

Mother: “That looks great! Forget this Wii thing we bought last year. What do I need to buy to play with Move and how much will it be?”

Who sees the issue? Cookie to the winner.

Nintendo in the eyes of analysts and their press enablers this generation: When they first started, there was no possible way they could win. Now, when they are on top, there is no possible way they can stay there.

“Players in this cycle expect deep, rich multiplayer online experiences and they also expect to be able to customise their games through digital content, so that places a premium or additional importance on online capability and also the ability to download to a hard drive”

EA’s shifty chief financial officer Eric Brown, telling us customers “expect” something that’s suspiciously in line with EA’s Project Ten Dollar. How convenient for EA that he says we think this way!

The difference between the current Wii shortage and the PS3 one basically boils down to fact and fiction.

Question: If you write a column about how violent video games are worse for kids than ones with sexual content, will angst-ridden male teens on a video game blog attack you violently with words, thereby proving your point?