We’re a little late this week, but luckily not pregnant with a baby podcast. Mike, Eric and Jenni fight off a zombie infestation while determining the best strategies against aliens and avoid random battles. (Actually they just talk about Resident Evil 5, Halo Wars and Persona 4 a.) For an added bonus, listen to the cast stumble awkwardly over issues of racism in Resident Evil 5.

In this week’s exciting episode Mike Eric and Jenni discuss Halo Wars, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Persona 4, The Fifth Estate, Amazon’s new trade in program, the iPhone as a gaming platform, and the dangers of drinking White Russians while podcasting.

While I set about a looking at the list of newly announced/release schedule for Nintendo’s pair of jugernaut consoles consisting of the first half of the year, a few titles stand out while the rest seem quite underwhelming. I appreciate Nintendo for making a leaps of faith with a certain title, however I feel as if this shows just how much internal dev at Nintendo is on autopilot and/or saving their big releases for the fall.

Merciful Allah here we go again. You may have caught some of the discussion on the recent “Islam is the light” debacle surrounding Baby Pals for the DS. I agree with the conclusions drawn on other gaming sites that have covered this, mainly that this woman needs a hobby and is hearing things that aren’t really there. What I want to add to this discussion is to focus on the other inflammatory aspect of the coverage. Clearly any news outlet that runs a story like this has little credibility to begin with. However, the viewpoint represented exists and, as gamers, we should not laugh this off when there are those who will take it seriously. We need to understand biases such as these if we are ever going to overcome them.

A word to the reader: This is not an attempt to bait anyone. I am not judging Nintendo against Microsoft or Sony since Nintendo is clearly doing their own thing at this point. The opinions contained within are mine, feel free to disagree with them, I merely ask that you do so in a civilized manner.

Let’s assume I was trying to run homebrew applications on my PSP. For this hypothetical scenario, my sole purpose for doing this would be to play PSone games on my PSP. Likewise assume that I own all of the games I will be using an emulator to play on the PSP and the programs I will be using to do so are free to use. The only thing stopping me from doing so would be the software running on the PSP. Is this at all fair? Is it right that the manufacturers of both handheld and home consoles control nearly every aspect of how we use them?

It’s that time of year again, the eggnog will be flowing, the carolers caroling, the chestnuts roasting, and the relatives are on their way. Don’t panic! This is your gaming guide for the holidays .

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