In the battle over technological dominance, audio is one area that's usually ignored — Alexander Brandon set out to fix that, and interviewed Gene Semel (audio director of SCEA) and Brian Schmidt (head of the Xbox audio team). It's a pretty interesting interview, and while it's unclear who comes out on top (not sure it really matters), seeing what Semel and Schmidt have to say about their respective systems is pretty enlightening.

Game designer Richard "Lord British" Garriott and his "immortality drive" — containing Crecente's genetic material — is officially in orbit now.

Yesterday, I got the chance to sit down for tea and biscuits with Akinori Nishiyama, producer on Sega's upcoming Sonic reboot Sonic Unleashed. When you get a chance to ask someone high up at Sega why they, uh, don't make good Sonic games anymore, you don't pass that chance up.

I'm usually OK with soundtracks as long as they don't actively annoy me; of course, it's nice when they do something more than just provide not-too-irritating background noise I may or may not turn off. Douglas Wilson looks at the relationship between gameplay, music, and meaning (and what makes for a 'musical' game) over at GameSetWatch, picking a perhaps unlikely example to illustrate the relationship he's talking about: Civilization IV.

I think the Law of Obsolete Console Modding should say something like, "It's not really cool until the console that replaced the obsolete console is itself obsolete." Of course, then it would be called "retro-cool" and I know how much you guys hate that term.

Surprise! WoW may be good for you (or rather, good for kids): LiveScience has a nice little piece up on the myriad uses of WoW in educational settings, from getting kids to up their reading and writing ability to parents who use it as part of homeschooling.

And we've received our first game pumpkin submission — Mega Man firing on Mr. Game & Watch from Super Smash Brothers. Reader Nathan G. carved it, about three weeks before Halloween, so, it should be good and slimy and rotted out by Oct. 31. Every year about this time we get hit with game pumpkins (not literally) so, if you're cravin' a carvin', get after it, snap it and send it to us.

The press has abandoned Tokyo Game Show, but the public hasn't. The business days have been a dud and two-thirds of the press have fled on the choked public days, but John and Jane Q. Consumer schlepped through the pissing rain to check out all of TGS's wares.

When you can't convince 35 other people of your master plan to attack two Alliance capital cities, you really only have one alternative: Do it yourself. "Bradster" does. He owns that rig above — 11 computers that run 36 World of WarCraft account simultaneously.