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A few days ago, GameDaily ran a short story from EEDAR (Electronic Entertainment Design And Research.) In this piece, the gist was that one in five games becomes a “success”, and that games which do not have playable demos before release sell better than games that do.

In September 2007, GameCritics.com interviewed Mare Sheppard, one of the two great minds behind PC indie game phenomenon N and its newer incarnation on consoles and handhelds, N+. At the time of the original interview, N+ hadn't yet made its debut on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service. Now that it's available for download, Mare was gracious enough to take a few more minutes out of her busy schedule for a follow-up chat.

I can't count the number of times I've heard people talk about getting bested at a videogame by a kid. These stories typically involve people in their thirties playing games with their kids and getting totally dominated, which then leads them to talk to their friends about how they can't believe how good this kid is at playing videogames. We've all heard some version of this, or perhaps experienced it firsthand.

In other news, Sony’s Scott Steinberg was recently quoted at GameDaily Biz as saying that the 360-exclusive downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV wasn’t going to be a big deal. My first inclination was to say that the man was smoking crack, but after further thought... I’m not too sure.

Out of all four Ace Attorney games, this one was by far the weakest. It didn't start getting interesting at all until former main character Phoenix Wright came back for a while in the fourth (and final) case, and that one was a confusing mess of quasi sci-fi with a lot of nonsense evidence-gathering in two different time periods, one in the present and one in the past.

Despite all the attention that has been given to so-called "wiiitis," there has yet to be any detailed description of the condition in the scientific literature. That's all about to change, however, with an article in the forthcoming May issue of the journal Skeletal Radiology that closely examines a case of acute "wiiitis" with the help of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The April issue of the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction contains a fascinating series of articles on the topic of videogame addiction, and in particular, on the question of whether such a thing as videogame addiction even exists. These writings make for an interesting discourse on a highly controversial subject.

Spent the last day or two playing Endless Ocean on the Wii. There have been a few low-stress ocean-exploring games over the years, but this is by far the best of them.

The debate over videogames and violence shows no signs of abating, and despite having grown a little weary of the topic, I'll admit that there's a part of me that remains ever intrigued by the latest research in this area. So in that spirit, here's another scientific article to further fuel the discussion.