"Looking back into my MMOG past, a pattern emerges: I've always been a tank. EverQuest? Paladin. City of Heroes? Ice Tanker. And now in EverQuest 2, Guardian. I played other classes too, but they were always just a diversion by comparison.

"I can't remember the last time being the main tank could be considered fun. So why do I do it? Because I'm a nice person or I'm a sucker - either way, I can't say 'no.' And maybe, because deep down somewhere, it's nice to be needed."

"One of the basic tenets of Persona 3 is that in order to fight Shadows, monsters that plague the minds of humans and essentially turn them into vegetables, you must summon Personas, spirits manifested from your character's psyche. To do so, you put a gun-like device, called an Evoker, to your head and pull the trigger. Fans of Persona 3 (or P3 for short) know that it's not a real gun, of course, but to the casual observer, the imagery is unmistakable. Far less offensive symbolism has captured the attention of the national media - a fate which P3 largely escaped.

"The question is, then - why take the risk?"

"The mixture of pride, relief and anticipation tied to the lengthy pursuit of an imaginary object is something that players of MMOG's (and, truth to tell, several other kinds of videogames) know very well. But it isn't something that came into existence with the current crop of MMORPG's and their highly developed grinding and loot mechanics, nor even with paper-and-dice RPG's and the Vorpal Swords that lurked in the pages of the Dungeon Master's Guide. The feeling is probably as old as storytelling itself, but its first obvious appearance in Western Civilization is in Homer's Iliad."

"What's on display here is the bad blood between two game series, Ninja Gaiden and Capcom's Devil May Cry. Sonia is a mockery of Dante, hero of Devil May Cry, a white-blonde, blue-eyed guy with a prominent Greek nose and a propensity for leather. He wields a pair of .45 autos called Ebony and Ivory. The placement of Itagaki's name on the shot of Ryu standing over a helpless parody of Dante sends a message: Ninja Gaiden, not Devil May Cry, stands at the crest of Hardcore Hill.

"But who gets that joke? Who cares about such archaic, macho grandstanding? Who is Itagaki's message really for? The answer is: the worst possible videogame customer."

"My night's plans were ruined by region locking: the restriction of game consoles and their games to only cooperate with each other inside certain geographic boundaries. For example, Japanese Wii games won't play on American or European Wiis, and vice versa. This also applies to every major home console, every movie on disc and even online stores like iTunes and Steam.

"Why do we still have region locking in an era of global gaming?"