Very few game addons are actually worth the points you have to shell out for them. I think the only one I've purchased this year is the pack for Project Gotham Racing 4, which added ten cars or so, a bunch of new modes, challenges, and online race types. Much of it was also offered as a free pack, so that everyone could use part of the new content. Not that it mattered, I suppose, since PGR4 sold poorly. I'm not even sure where my money went, now that Bizarre Creations is with Activision and Turn 10 now has the PGR license, so my whole plan of supporting dudes who work hard and make good games probably backfired.

I did also purchase an awful lot of Rock Band DLC, but I don't really count that alongside the other stuff as it's sort of a platform unto itself. I don't even want to think about how much I spent on songs for that game...I just know I have well over 4GB of DLC for it.

The top on my list of unashamed DLC would have to be PAIN. That game came free with my PS3 - fine, I guess, as I didn't have to pay anything for it. I wouldn't have paid anything for it - it's a shell of a game and not worth $10. Now it has what...two extra level packs at $5 each, plus a good dozen $1 characters? A person could easily spend $30 on PAIN, which is ridiculous. LittleBigPlanet's DLC costumes are almost as bad, since they're little more than Oblivion horse armor...only they come in a larger variety of styles.

If you had asked me six months ago, I would have laughed in your face. Gaming on a cell phone? Yeah right.

Then I bought one (well, a 2G iPod Touch). And I've played around with the app store and had a look at the games available, and the games that are coming out. Sure, the device is missing buttons so it'll never replace a traditional control scheme, but aren't we past the urge to play console games on the go? Isn't that why the PSP has so little interest, what with all of the sloppy PS2 ports?

Anything turn-based, anything requiring simple control schemes, point and click gameplay - hell, anything that uses the DS the way it should be used could easily be ported to the iPhone. Nintendo knows this, that's why they've got the upcoming DSi and its store. It's probably too little too late, though, and too restrictive in terms of the barriers to entry.

Puzzle Quest is out next week for the iPhone, and looks to be the definitive version - the graphics of the PSP port, the controls of the DS game, plus extra content...yes please. I've played it on the PSP and on the 360, and using traditional controls is clunky and awkward as hell. It should be pleasantly easy to play on the iPhone in comparison, and will mean I can finally toss the laggy (albeit fun)  Aurora Feint.

Think of all the games that would benefit by the higher resolution screen and greater capacity of the iPhone - games that would benefit from periodic content updates, similar to Professor Layton's downloadable puzzles. Professor Layton is a great example of a game that would be a perfect fit for the platform and its controls. So is Phoenix Wright. After playing Tap Tap Revenge it's easy to see how you could play a version of Elite Beat Agents on the iPhone as well, plus the crazy extra controls that would be possible using the multitouch capabilities.

The only thing I'm not sold on is the accelerometer. There is a fun game called Defend that uses it well, but many games try to do more than they should - moving a character in a platformer, for example, or banking shots in a tennis game. Some games have the right idea in that they keep you on your toes by switching your viewpoint periodically (see the previously mentioned Defend, which is well worth 99 cents). Like great DS games, great iPhone games play to the strengths of the platform.

With Square's upcoming release of previously Japanese-only mobile games, I hope to see some of their DS games as well. The 3D Final Fantasy ports would be quite playable with some tweaks to the controls, and could even have a slight graphical update.

Final Fantasy Tactics would work wonderfully as well. Joan D'Arc too. I'd even pay premiums for those games over the usual $0.99 to $9.99 price range of applications in the store. And hell, my first wish - Puzzle Quest - did come true, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Phoenix and Layton, or at least something in a similar vein. Or Meteos or Lumines. Do all that and I might even be tempted to ditch my DS.

The new trivia feature is awesome.

Many of the questions are not.

After completing a little over 200 questions, here are three rules that I think should be implemented:

Or rather, the people who attend them are creepy. The last one I attended was Halo 3, and that's just because I could walk to the store and was up at midnight anyway. When I got there, however...

You get a mixture of people. There were a few kids bouncing around, and you can tell that their exhausted mothers are barely putting up with the little buggers being overtired, and god knows why they didn't just wait until the next day so everyone could get some well-deserved rest.

Then you get the curious, who usually feel the need to lug their girlfriends along in order to distinguish themselves from the disturbingly hardcore. I'd put myself in this category, and yeah, I brought my girlfriend along (although in my defense she was curious as well).

The last category is the one that disturbs me. They're the physical manefestation of your typical forumer, in the case of Halo 3 excitedly debating the strengths and weaknesses of Master Chief in slightly nasal tone, stopping every ten or fifteen seconds to catch their breath and push their glasses back up on their nose. I realize that with different releases you get a slightly different breed of this sort of gamer, but Halo 3 has some of the craziest fans. You get different people again at console launches (good lord are those people weird) and if midnight releases existed for niche games the turnout for those would include some of the most obsessed - but friendly - fans. I'd be very curious to see who would turn out at a midnight release event for Persona  4, for example. Then again, maybe I would regret it.

I'm not talking the hardware itself - the unit is pretty solid and the controller is nice enough. Still, it's weird that all they give you in the box are plain composite cables (I ended up using my PS2's component cables for HD) and the world's shortest USB cable for charging. I don't sit that far away from the TV and I can't play and charge the controller at the same time with that dinky cable. I guess that's how they sell extra ones.

It's everything else that feels unfinished. The cross media bar is a nice idea but there's just so much shit on there it runs together. It loads slowly. Accessing friends' trophy data takes anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds and sometimes it'll hang for longer. Downloading patches and updates takes forever, and I've already had multiple issues with the downloads screwing up halfway through and having to start them all over again. Some games that install patches suggest you to restart the game, but they then display a message to hold the PS button and quit and restart the game yourself. Really? Do I really need to install demos or addons I've downloaded too?

I like the console well enough, but I don't feel as stoked about the purchase as I did when I got a 360 a few years back. Once you take multiplatform games that I've already played out of the equation, there's very little left on the PS3 that becomes an absolute must-have. Sure, Little Big Planet is out soon, but that and MGS4 and Uncharted and (maybe) Ratchet and Heavenly Sword and that's the end of your list. I'd add GT5 on there, but it's even more of a demo than I thought it would be, which was a complete disappointment.

Maybe I'm just grumpy about everything. I wish my 360 was as quiet as my PS3. I wish it had a bigger hard drive. I wish it didn't have that stupid power brick.

Maybe I should have waited on the PS3, since the main reason I got the MGS4 bundle was a last-ditch effort to score backwards compatibility. And you know what? I resent Sony for that, even if I fell for it.

I've managed to avoid anything gamebreaking so far - of course, I've also avoided the online portion after hearing horror stories of people losing stats and game progress when jumping back into singleplayer.

Didn't Alien Hominid have a similar bug when it launched, where your save game would be wiped almost randomly? Condemned 2, albeit by a different developer, also had a gamebreaking save glitch that would helpfully wipe your progress depending on when you quit the game. Nothing hurts a good game more than fucking with the player's hard earned rewards. It's why people go totally bananas whenever minor server glitches in World of Warcraft make their tier 5 boots disappear for a few hours.

If these glitches are that widespread it's sad, because Castle Crashers is an absolutely fantastic game. It's got a ton of subtle (and not so subtle) brawler homages and it manages to be a deeper and more satisfying beat em up than any of them in the process. Add the extra characters, the weapons, and the ridiculously cute animal orbs and you've got a ton of content - which I suppose makes losing your progress all the more painful. Here's hoping for a patch.

I've already played more of Too Human than I planned - and most of the achievements are simple enough to earn, so I'll probably get as many as I can. I'm also curious what red epic armor looks like, although I realize that in order to see any I'll have to replay many of the already repetitive levels.

I rented the game, so I'm spared the expense there. Everything that the reviews are saying is more or less true: it's ugly, has a horribly told story and boring characters, relatively mindless combat, too much good loot, too few enemies, and the levels feel exactly the fucking same as one another and just go on and on.

Yet there's an appeal there I can't quite put my finger on. Knocking enemies flying while swooping around in an almost comical fashion is pretty satisfying. The loot is nice, even if it tends to run together (and it's about as interesting as Mass Effect's progressively boring numerical armors and weapons most of the time). Some of the armor even looks kickass, and I've avoided upgrading my actual stats on a few occasions just so I could keep my massive Warhammer-style shoulders and mammoth boots.

The charm system is interesting, too, although the game really did a poor job of introducing you to it, and it never really becomes necessary. Same with the various classes - they are distinct to a degree, but you'll be playing the game the same way no matter what you pick because one or two tactics will get you past everything. The enemy AI is not all that advanced, and deaths come less because of lack of skill and more from numbers, or a cheap pairing of polarity enemies.

It's poorly balanced, too. Most of the bosses strongly favour ranged attacks, which makes the berserker a remarkably poor choice. It's all doable, of course, but when you do a fraction of the damage of the commando or champion, most of the bosses devolve into shooting and walking backwards for ten minutes.

I like the site - it's got some rough edges, sure, but it also has some ridiculously addictive qualities. I've gone a bit nuts with certain games, namely Beyond Dark Castle. I'd love to be able to collect actual in-game screenshots (rather than menu shots) but because the screen dump function on old Macs automatically defaults to the drive in use, it tries to save the screenshots to the disc drive. And the game disk for Beyond Dark Castle is so bursting with data that there isn't room for a single screenshot, which is sad. A dump of the mutants yammering on hucking rocks at you, Prince Duncan whacking the brewery guy in the head with a shovel, or the retching gargoyle trying to interrupt your casual helipack ride through the swamp - all of it would be awesome.

I also enjoy how large the main user icons are. I wish I could move the area it chose to nab as my small icon, as Nordom's head is kind of low in-frame, but it's a minor issue. I can even do Facebook style status messages...and I've got a wall. Dear god.

As for Torment itself, it's a game I replayed recently and started wishing that more people could play it. It's one of those games - when you make a list of the top five best videogame stories, you would have an extremely difficult time justifying Planescape: Torment's exclusion. It's still the single best story I've ever experienced in a game, and is easily the best written game on top of that. Yes, the combat kind of sucks, but they wisely downplayed that in favour of lots of dialogue, and the vast majority of the game is just you running around adventure-game style with the freedom an RPG offers you. Is your Nameless One a dick? Ask for rewards all the time, extort money, threaten people, kill them even when they fork over a reward, lie constantly, keep telling everyone that you're Adahn...or you can be a goodie two-shoes or pretty much anything in between.

My last run was mostly kind, although I tended towards the chaotic as I lied a bit and did crazy things whenever possible. But how can you risk howling along with the leader of the barking dogs or constantly teasing Morte?

Someone needs to reprint Planescape: Torment. If not that, people need to do whatever needs to be done to get it up on Steam. Everyone should be able to play Torment, but there are so few copies (and those that exist command ridiculous prices on EBay) that not everyone can. And that's a shame.

Everyone should be entitled to snuggle Annah's pillows.