“My girls loved that movie. It seemed only natural to get this copy for them,” he says as he holds his youngest daughter, Susan, in his arms. “I didn’t know the game would be so…so…different.” When Sanders returned with the game, his girls rushed to load the game so they could experience what had become one of their favorite movies all over again. Unfortunately, they had no idea what was in store for them.

“It just wasn’t the same,” Sanders recalls. “It started up like any other movie. The girls picked play and sat back down on the couch with me to watch it, but then things started to happen on screen. Things that required the girls to get back up and start interacting with it. Before we could do anything, they were living out the story as if they were Coraline. I didn’t know what to do.” So Sanders did the only thing he could, he threw the game away.

The Sanders family now sits alone in their house, the absence of joy and laughter blanketing every room. Instead, they try to get over the horror that they faced that terrible afternoon when the movie they loved became too real. They are trying to move on now. Charlie and his wife Alice have taken up tennis in hopes to get away from the house as much as possible. Susan now finds herself at friend’s houses most of the time, avoiding the rooms with TVs in them. However, their oldest daughter Sarah has taken a different route, one that has frightened the family.

“She started reading. We’re not sure what to do. She says she liked being able to live out the story and wanted to get more of it.” Mrs. Sanders beings to weep as she recounts her daughter’s abnormal behavior. “We’ve caught her in her room at night, a book in one hand and a flashlight in the other. It scares us. We don’t know what to think. One day she’s talking about some book about being a young boy out sailing with pirates, and the next she’s regaling us with tales of underwater adventures. It has to stop. We can’t take it anymore. We’re Americans. We like our entertainment shown to us, we don’t want to be engaged by it.”

For now, all the Sanders can do is pray for their daughter, and pray they do. Every night before bed, Mr. and Mrs. Sanders have a moment of silence for their misguided child in hopes that one day she will return to reality. Until then, however, they will live day to day, trying to overcome all the hardships that Coraline has brought them.

Coraline is currently available for the Nintendo Wii at all major retailers.

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With it’s first week of eligibility, I think, Resident Evil 5 has dominated every chart. In all likelihood, Capcom’s fifth installment into its already groundbreaking Resident Evil series has proven itself a force to be reckoned with. The rest of the chart, in all plausibility, stands pretty firm with most of the titles holding their ground for multiple weeks.

1. Resident Evil 5?
2. Street Fighter IV, I’d like to think
3. Gears of War II, most definitely
4. F.E.A.R. 2, right?
5. GTA IV: Lost and the Damned. That counts as a game, doesn’t it?
6. Fallout 3. Maybe. Not sure on that one.
7. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II believably.
8-10. I don’t know, just think of 3 more games and it’s probably those.

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“He called me all excited and out of breath,” Carlos tells reporters. “He was going on and on about how he found a copy of God of War III on PS2. He was just so excited.” It wasn’t long after his conversation with Carlos that Roger found out the sad truth.

Roger, now buzzing hard off his third Red Bull, approached the cashier with the case for what he believed to be God of War III. It was then that he was told it was, in fact, God of War II.

“It broke my heart,” he says as he relives that tragic moment. “I was so excited to be able to play God of War III on my PS2. I guess in my haste I just didn’t notice that it was II and not III. I just feel so lost now, like something’s missing. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back.”

Roger is now looking into getting professional help. With his spirit shattered, all there is left for Roger is to pick up the pieces of his former life and move on, always remembering the lessons the tragedy has taught him.

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“We’re excited to be able to further our vision for Virtual Console,” said a Nintendo spokesperson, “to provide a platform for re-experiencing nostalgic or overlooked games from your childhood that you wouldn’t find at retail, and charge you five dollars for them.”

In Nethack, players choose one of several classes, ranging from staples such as the Wizard or Knight to the more esoteric Tourist or Archaeologist, and embark on an epic quest for godhood before dying to a soldier ant on the third level.

“While Nethack will be a different experience for most Wii gamers, we hope that it will bring a new generation the joys of repeated, unremitting failure” said the spokesperson.

When asked about the difficulties in porting a primarily keyboard driven game with several dozen separate commands, our spokesman was nonplussed. “We’ve put an unprecedented amount of work into updating the game to take advantage of the Wii’s strengths. It features a new inventory system that can be navigated by the Wii remote. Players will be able to cast spells through specific gestures with the remote, and commands like Untrap or Teleport can be accomplished by vaguely waggling the remote in front of the screen and hoping for the best.”

The Virtual Console incarnation of Nethack will retain its ASCII-based tileset in the face of recent graphical improvements, such as ‘graphics’. Nintendo hopes that this move will attract its more diehard enthusiasts to the primarily family-marketed console, while giving younger players an educational incentive to learn the alphabet.

While Nethack was until this point a freeware game, Nintendo believes that the added value in shaking a controller and watching letters move across your widescreen high definition TV more than justifies the cost. “We’ve been able to upscale the graphics with only minimal slowdown,” said the spokesperson, “bringing you moving alphanumeric characters in a clarity never before seen.”

Nethack will sell for 1000 Wii points.

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As a recent development, the Cambridge study links the monolithic popularity of World of Warcraft with a resurgence in gold farming and griffon riding among America’s youth. Richard Garriott, known by his videogame moniker, Lord British, dismisses the findings as a weak attempt to disenfranchise a booming videogame market, “Just because I developed and played Ultima Online and I happen to live in a castle… the media loves to sensationalize these stories. Most of my friends who play games don’t live in castles.”

Garriott’s words haven’t convinced everyone of his innocence however; many still blame Ultima for the mining, taming and homeownership epidemics of the late 90s. “We’re still dealing with the consequences of the 90s housing bubble” says NY Economics Student, Lorry Melgrove, “With the rising value of gold, are we ready to deal with this new crisis?”

For years, politicians have drawn the link between videogames and abhorrent behavior, but without any clinical evidence to back up their claims, they were passed off as out-of-touch bureaucrats. Now, parent’s appeals for regulation against the harmful effects of games hold a newfound sense of validity. Gamers, however, present an ever persuasive argument against this movement – it’s the parents’ responsibility to teach their children not to make questionable financial investments or to spend weeks inside cold, hazardous mining shafts, not Washington’s. While this debate rages on, one thing is now quite clear, all those hours your children spend in front of The Sims is instilling terrible home coordination and reckless hygienic habits.

Psychologist, Gregory Mutz, “These computer games reward certain behaviors; they send a message to kids that these behaviors are acceptable.” Mutz, who played a key role in organizing the Chicago based group, Parents Against Game Addiction (PAGA), explains, “If you are going to tell kids, ‘yeah, its ok to sell off your tamed nightmare, rare dyes and valorite platemail to buy the deed to a two story wood and plaster house’, well that’s not something I want my kids learning.”

Mutz retells the heart wrenching story of his brother’s unquenchable serial homeownership. After liquidating his retirement fund, Lionel Mutz spent the three latter years of the 1990s going from state to state, taking out loans and purchasing novelty homes. At the end of it all, Lionel was forced to give up half of his 9 homes as part of a divorce agreement, and he can only see his son on weekends and holidays. But this isn’t the only horror story.

San Montigo Mayor Allejandro Garcia recalls the crushing despair of discovering his dreams of subjecting the town to devastating natural disasters and raising taxes above 50% to finance carving his favorite Garfield comic into the side of a nearby mountain were unattainable outside the distorted mayoral based gameplay of the Sim City series.

Gregory Mutz, “The question we should be asking is, ‘what can game makers be doing to encourage financial responsibility?’” On this point Lorry agrees, “Mr. Garriott may be comfortable in his castle, but working class Americans can’t afford to buy homes and horde gold. The industry should do more to educate their consumers about the very real dangers of their games and the importance of not losing touch with practicality.”

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“We didn’t know what to do, he looked dead,” said one of the men, a 25 year old sales representative for a major American soap company. “He was wearing these really weird clothes and the goofiest looking helmet we had ever seen.”

The men eventually took the boy into a nearby town and to the local police station for identification and housing. However, when scanned, the boy’s prints were not on file at either the local precinct or the Paris station.

“I feel bad for him. When we picked him up, he kept muttering something about a princess.” The two Americans who discovered him have since offered to take him back to America when they return. “We’re not gay or anything, but we both feel like it’s our responsibility to raise him since we found him.”

The young man who has been dubbed Steve by the two appears not to speak any known language other than the word “princess” which he repeats ad nauseam. The two men hope to teach him English once they return to their home in San Francisco.

Until their return, though, the two men and the young boy have found a home in the town of Argenton-sur-Creuse in central France. Locals are fascinated by the “hornless boy” (or “hornless garçon” in French) as they have come to call him. The trio has found refuge in the homes of the locals as they wait for papers to take the child back with them.

The two men plan to return to Argenton-sur-Creuse in a few years when the boy has grown older to help him find his real family or some semblance of a past, but until that time, he will be known as Steve of San Francisco.

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“Sure, we all know and love Mario,” says Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Nintendo’s mascot, “but I think it’s time he changed to keep up with the times. We’ve seen other franchises make those changes, like Shadow the Hedgehog, and that game was huge, right?”

Gun-totting hedgehogs aside, though, there has been much talk in the Nintendo ranks over the new direction to take the aging plumber. Many feel that a loss of the overalls and even the old and ratty hat might be the best way to go. It is this crowd that wishes to get a big-name international fashion designer behind the project. Pat Merch of Nintendo America explains.

“As a young, hip business executive, it should be obvious that I would know more about what gamers really want than some group of aging nerds. Mario should be like me, trendy, healthy, devoid of anything that could possibly be considered human or original.” Merch’s sentiments have made waves through Nintendo America and even Nintendo’s home base in Japan. While there are those who side with Merch, there are more still that oppose his views.

Neil Neilson, Chief Executive of Internal Sales and Marketing, feels that Mario is fine how he is, that his image shouldn’t change because it is such a strong institution that changing it would alienate millions of consumers and fans of the company.

“This is why I make $100k a year and Neilson has a made-up job title” remarks Merch when asked about Neilson’s opinion. “That guy is so out of touch with reality.”

No word yet on what designers have been approached, if any, over the the project, but sources say that there have been plans to speak with a number of top American designers. Until then, Neilson says he will continue to fight what he sees as an injustice to the name of Mario and hopefully get the situation with his job title corrected. He’s pessimistic about the latter.

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