Okay, so maybe this piece find you a little too early, but what the heck. We're going to be celebrating Christmas dinner and ripping up presents in a few hours or minutes (depending on what part of the globe you're in), with a fresh new year waiting for us in six to seven days. You know what that means, people...consider this a bit of quiet time for some of the older among us.

It's been a crazy year for a lot of us, and we're not even getting to the part of the console launches. For one, we've been looking at congress attempt to wangle new (and queer) legislation, like the ill-fated "Truth in Video Game Ratings Act" from way back. Good thing that never took off. Then there's the ESRB...which has enough coverage that we won't be mentioning 'em any more.

Moving on to the more stranger side of the year, there's our all-time favorite lawyer, Phoenix Wright Jack Thompson. We're at a loss of how to describe him. On one hand, he's been dissing off anything that is Rockstar, be it the GTA franchise or Bully. On the other hand, though, we found ourselves agreeing ever-so-slightly to some of his points, along with the other surveys that say violent gaming might spur violent behavior (Key word: might).

How is this so? It shows in our language, and most prominently, in the way we've balked at Thompson's statements in the blogs - by way of flaming. "Violence begets violence," as the old saying goes, and maybe the more intolerant we are of his statements, the more fired up his kind gets. With over six billion people (correct me if I'm wrong) on earth, you can't expect everybody to agree with you.

Well, now that we've gotten some of this bad karma off our chest, let's look at the brighter side of things, after this jump