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The September issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health unveils the results of a large research study on the effects of playing Re-Mission, a third-person shooter designed to help young cancer patients improve their knowledge of cancer and boost their confidence in managing the disease. Now that the results are in, how does Re-Mission fare?

This weekend was Vanillaware weekend for me, and you know what? These guys rock the 2D art, but wow... They don't craft the kind of gameplay I want to spend time with.

With all the recent debate about whether or not videogames should be consider (good or bad) art, would it not be of cultural significance and a sign of the times (no pun intended) if the venerable news institution declared that videogames was indeed worthy of being covered alongside the paintings by artist Willem de Kooning, the singing of soprano Natalie Dessay or comedic "genius" of Dane Cook in Good Luck Chuck?

Compared to the more beautiful and elaborate next-generation experiences currently available, most of the games I loved as a kid (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, etc.) seem like mere trifles by comparison. In absolute terms, BioShock is certainly a much better game than Wolfenstein 3D (one of the earliest first-person shooters). Does it follow then that modern gamers get more enjoyment from their videogames than gamers of previous generations did from theirs?

If it accomplishes nothing else, Viva Pinata: Party Animals shows that someone, somewhere in the hierarchy at Microsoft understands the importance of attempting to expand their user base.

The long-awaited Halo 3 reviews are in, and—just like Bioshock—there were tons of hands-on impressions, detailed previews, and fever-pitch hype. So it didn't surprise me that it received ubiquitously raving reviews, with 9s and 10s littering the field.

After season five of The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) saw its ratings gradually decline from previous seasons, there's been talk amongst fans about how the show could be reinvigorated for the sixth season, featuring welterweights Matt Hughes and Matt Serra. After watching the second season of the all-female Muay Thai reality show, Fight Girls, on the Oxygen Network, I think the boys from TUF could learn a few things from the girls.

The June issue of Cognitive Systems Research contains a curious article entitled "Employing emotions to drive plot generation in a computer-based storyteller." Using a computer program built on the premise that “a story can be represented as a cluster or group of emotional links and tensions between characters…[and] story-actions work as operators that modify such clusters,” the author took several computer-generated stories along with one that he wrote himself and had them independently rated. The results are intriguing.

At the recent Penny Arcade Expo, a small table in the back corner of the exhibition hall had a long line of people waiting to try a game that looked like a few pixels thrown onto a blank screen. It was stunning, to say the least. Metanet reveals all about their upcomig hit, N.

Sega Rally's demo served a valuable purpose beyond just giving me a chance to try the game out. It reminded me that the arcade sim racer genre still existed. Back in the heyday of arcades, people lined up for literally minutes to sit in a comfortable molded plastic chair and drive a few laps around a Daytona track.