No, that headline is not a prescription for your weekend in Las Vegas. It’s what happens tovideo games over time. There was once a time when you could not get any more hardcore than a game of Pac Man.And then Ms. Pac Man came along and amped the whole Pac Man formula up to 11. It was insane! It wasfast! More than a few gamers gladly blew their salaries supporting a debilitating Power Pellet addiction. It was aboutas hardcore as hardcore gets.

Pac Man today has been tossed into the “Retro” bin and is avoided by teens who think it lame, slow, boringand ugly. May as well call Akira Kurosawa’s Ran crap because it’s 20 years old, or write off allblack-and-white movies because they lack “realistic” coloration, right?

There’s still hope.

Most of us who grew up with classic arcade titles are now in our 30s and are—despite the best advice of those whoknow better—having children. We owe it to our kids to make sure that they do not evaluate games in a vacuum, toeducate them on why the classics are classics so that they don’t arrive at Joystiq 10 years from now send us hate maillike this: “for JS to say [Geometry Wars] is their fav is a slap in the face to 360 buyers. Pd0 is 100 times betterplaying online then this silly game. And so is just about every other 360 launch title.”

I forgive the kid, because today’s teens grew up in a cultural vacuum. Their parents are generally too old to havegrown up with Atari and Nintendo and therefore failed to pass on any understanding of what makes a good game a goodgame. These kids have failed to inherit cultural or critical literacy. Just as school children must readDickens, Hemingway and Salinger as part of a proper education, so too should a proper diet of game classics be requiredplaying. During summer breaks and by force, if necessary.

If you’re one of the lucky ones and havemanaged to get your hands on a 360, you’ve probably hookedit up to Xbox Live and watched as notifications flood the screen every time a friend signs on. While you canturn these off, online status isn’tall there is to the new Xbox Live friend-tracking system.

Using an original Xbox, you can view your friends list to see which game each friend is playing. If it’s the same gameas you, you may be able to see more information—such as, in Halo 2, who they’re playing with and what they’replaying. Now, even if you don’t have a 360, you can sign in to Xbox.com and view youronline friends list to see what they’re up to and whenthey were last online.

However, it doesn’t stop there. Not only can you see whether your friends are winning or losing from your onlinefriends list, you can invoke their profile using your 360 console to find out a lot more. Are they viewing pictures?Playing music? Downloading? What’s their score so far? Imagine our surprise as voice messages flood in regarding thepuny points achieved in our current game ofHexic. Especially for those with well-publicisedgamertags, the “appear offline” functionality grows in appeal. It’s nice to keep track of close friends, but do youwant the random people you played with once knowing your every move?

A gamer’s gotta do what a gamer’s gotta do. Microsoftare being brought to task by a Chicago man who’s displeased with the number ofglitches present in the newly-launched 360 and haslaunched a lawsuit as a result.

Claiming that Microsoft rushed their console to market in order to beat their competitors, resulting in a defectiveproduct, Robert Byers is suing for “unspecified damages and litigation-related expenses, as well as the replacement orrecall of Xbox 360 game consoles.”

Seems like lawyers are makingalotofmoney out of video games recently; it would be a shame ifthe threat of lawsuits proved to be the primary motivation for other console makers to release a working product.Regardless of the actual number of defective 360s, which Microsoft claim isless than 3% of the total number of units, they aren’tgoing to live this down.

[via Xbox 360 Fanboy -thanks to everyone who sent this in]

It’s bad news for opponents of in-game advertising—the results of the “most exhaustive” study yet, investigating the effects of advertising in games, were released today. While “exhaustive” seems to mean 1,350 young male gamers, the results are encouraging to advertisers, showing that 69% remember seeing certain ads as they play. More interestingly, Nielsen Entertainment found that gamers actually like in-game ads, as they provide added realism.

With advertising looking increasingly likely to creep intoXbox 360 games, as well as already being included invarious MMOs, will we have to go entirely offline to avoidadvertisements? Bringing ads into games is a logical step for companies, since television viewing is becoming lessfrequent amongst young people. However, there are moreinteresting ways to get gamers interested in your product than by slapping a clunky billboard in-game; while thesemost recent study results show that people remember ads, will they cause them to buy the product?

PC enthusiasts may already be familiar with Wik & the Fable of Souls (demo here). The hip 2D platformer, with old school action aesthetics, is making its Xbox Live Arcade debut this week, alongside the “greatest game ever.” The Xbox 360 version features the new “Firepit” mode, as well as 3 new multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, Wik is not Live-enabled, so multiplayer games are limited to a single console. But don’t let this minor limitation stop you from checking out this budget-priced indie title that will keep your inner retro-gamer satisfied for hours.

[Thanks, Godfree]

Should celebrities like Paris Hilton be given an Xbox 360 when the console shortage is so widespread? OneVirgin Megastore manager doesn’t think so. Bart Saunt, the manager in question, believes showing pictures of celebgamers was a mistake when so many hardcore gamers go without a machine.

A handful of celebrity given systems isn’t going to put a dent in Microsoft’s current inventory problems, so are celebgamer citings just good PR?

Is your Monday morning office feeling like a war zone? Have you been dodging heavy artillery from your boss orhiding out in that bunker you call a cube? Listen up, sergeant! Pro-G has over 20 new screen shots of 360 launch titleCall of Duty 2. So what are your first impressions of this game?

While Japanese gamers hit the streets this Saturday for the Xbox360 launch (or not), the rest of the Asian Xbox marketswill have to wait a few months longer. Microsoft has confirmed that the 360 will debut in South Korea on Feb. 24, andin Taiwan and Singapore on March 2. No word on a Chinese launch date yet, or if there will be two versions of theconsole for these markets.

Xbox 360 regional executive Alan Bowman said that Microsoft wants to make sure the 360 is teasingconsumers available in all existing Xbox 1 markets within the first six months.

We’d figured as early as February that Microsoft wouldforgo placing a next-gen optical drive in the Xbox 360 for a myriad of acceptable reasons, but we couldn’t help butkeep the nagging issue of disc space from lingering in the back of our minds. From the high-res textures fit for anHDTV to the higher polygon counts befitting a next-gen console, the space available on standard DVDs is suddenly inincreasingly short supply. So far we’ve yet to see an Xbox 360 game take up more than a single disc, but if the mostrecent issue of Game Informer is any indication, Microsoft may soonbe sweating their decision to pass up on a next-gen storage format.

The issue takes an in-depth look at all the features of the Xbox 360, and while GI is generally quite takenwith the 360’s performance, functionality, and especially its controller, they unearth some unsettling detailsregarding the console’s diminuitive storage capacity. According to Game Informer, nearly every developer theytalked to at X05 expressed difficulties fitting their launch titles onto a single disc. One unnamed yet “highlyanticipated” game in particular is said to currently occupy a full four 9Gb DVDs. Elder Scrolls IV immediatelyjumps to mind [UPDATE: or perhaps not, duuur], butany of those Japanese RPGs that Microsoft is alwaystouting are also likely candidates. Microsoft’s J Allard downplayed the storage issues, citing that improvedcompression rates in the future will allow much more data to be held on an individual disc, and that the pre-launchcrunch forced many current 360 titles to use space far more inefficiently than they would have otherwise.

Microsoft has already hinted that a future add-on maybe developed to allow the 360 to handle high-def movies, but that the device would be unrelated to gaming. Should thestatus quo remain unchanged, that means that Xbox 360 owners will be stuck with standard DVD media until at least thenext console generation, circa 2010. And, obviously, just because a title is relegated to multiple discs doesn’t meanthat it can’t be a great game—just look at Final Fantasy VII. But in this modern era, will consumers still putup with swapping discs mid-play? Games which are linear, such as Halo, may have little to lose by opting for amulti-disc format, but games which are, er… cubic, such as Grand Theft Auto, may take a significanthit in their ease of playability. All told, did Microsoft make the right decision when choosing the 360’s opticaldrive? If not, would they risk segmenting their fanbase by releasing a newer, HD-DVD enabled box in the future?