The DVD drive mods that people got banned for were all about playing 'backups' which really means pirated games in 99% of these cases.

Those great salaries are likely paid to the employees most willing to berate someone into giving them their kids lunch money.

I have an Xbox and I'm going to pay my $50/yr to use live. It would be nice if that experience, games like the online version of 1vs100, the facebook integration that's coming, and just the general messaging services of Live itself, could be extended more thouroughly to my PC and mobile device. The trick is, I won't pay any extra, or for seperate access to all three platforms. I also won't pay $5 for a lightsaber for my avatar.

It's also pretty risky too. I used to work at a factory, the 360 was fairly popular with the hourly guys there and I'd say roughly half of them had hacked their DVD drives to be able to play pirate games. But, every big release resulted in one or two of them getting banned from Live too.

Guitar Hero "Smash Hits" to sell like Hot Cakes?!?!?!?! Its a greatest hits album for a music game.....any greatest hits should have just been released as DLC. In fact, I think I've bought about 300 rock band songs, at $2 each, that equals about 10 times a single copy of a game (since they've said they don't make money on the controllers).

For some tool to come along and claim they are fake.

The Bannerbomb hack for the Wii really caught on in May. If you are even a little tech savvy you can pretty easily use a soft mod to play burned disks. If you are really crafty, you can play them via a USB attached HDD. That had to have an impact on games like Tiger Woods 10.

With the tail found intact, I think it's increasingly more likely that we're seeing a similar set of circumstances to the A300 accident in NYC in November of 2001. The aircraft lost it's tail, due to turbulance, commanded or uncommanded maximum rudder deflection followed by structural failure. One of the first ACARS messages received was a Rudder travel limit error.

I thought I read somewhere MS stopped sending coffins in the US? FWIW, I own all three, the Wii died once and took about 6 weeks to get replaced. It was kind of a suprise because we never really use the thing. The 360 died twice, once was a 2 week replacement and the other was due to a power supply failure. The people at the call center weren't much help in troubleshooting that. The PS3 has never been repaired, but it's really just a blue-ray player for us. The 360 gets by far the most use. Best online community and best games hands down.

Once more in Iambic Pentameter

I was talking about the Wii version. There's no voice chat there.

I don't mind violence and profanity in games, I just want a software switch the bleeps or turns the profanity off. I just don't see a point in hearing curse words. Yes, as an ex-marine I do realize that real marines curse, however having it in a video game doesn't add realism. Real Marines scratch their junk constantly and talk about girls, sex, and racial sterotypes. Unless you are going all the way with the profanity I don't see the point. Call of Duty WaW comes to mind here, there's an inordinate amount of profanity but there's also a switch to turn it off, however for some stupid, stupid reason, it doesn't work in online play.