The recent announcement by ActiVision to up the price for Modern Warfare 2 a notch in the United Kingdom has angered many gamers. Microsoft, quickly following suit with Forza Motorsport 3, didn’t do anything to stop the usual “don’t support this” and “I will pirate that” posts flooding popular gaming forums.

When looking at the release calendar for the year, it can become a bit daunting and depressing when thinking about just how many shooters for consoles there are. Now don’t get my wrong, I love a good first person shooter,…

If you are anything like me then you have a certain lust for information on gaming. This desire, some might call it an addiction, prompts me to check gaming sites multiple times daily. However, during the 80% of the year when major releases are few and far between, gaming sites tend to get a bit heavy on previewing future releases. This is understandable, and it’s not like I ignore these previews, but sometimes I certainly wish that I had.

For years video games have been stigmatized by worried parents and opportunistic politicians. Fortunately for gamers, there are people like Dr. Christopher Ferguson of Texas A&M International University. Ferguson authored a paper about a year ago arguing that studies claiming to link violent video games to violent behavior are, “faulty and fail to acknowledge the significant methodological and constructional divides between existing video game research and acts of serious aggression and violence.” Which is fancy academic talk for what most of us already knew: killing in a game won’t transmogrify you into a murderer.

When looking at the best selling games of 2008 it is quite easy to find yourself lost in a sea of numbers, mainly the overwhelming dominance on both the handheld and home console dominance that Nintendo seems to hold. However it is defiantly important to look at the historical context of what these sales mean, because without the context it is impossible to see how over or underwhelming this dominance by Nintendo is. Certainly if you have not seen the sales figures put out by the NPD group illustrating the top sellers of 2008 it is an important list to look over and analyze: