Seriously, there’s a bunch of black friday gaming deals. 1up has the scoop: go check it out.

With the advent of the Xbox 360′s NXE dashboard interface, a bizarre corporate game of telephone resulted in Sony’s intellectual property (films from its subsidiary, Columbia Pictures) being sold on competitor Microsoft’s online service (via NetFlix). In a move that could be uncharitably characterized as a childish tantrum, Sony last week delisted its Columbia Pictures films from the service.

This week, however, Sony has changed its mind and decided to do business again with NetFlix. Although it might be possible to explain away the sudden withdrawal without appealing to financial skullduggery, the sudden and rapid reinstatement of the titles is a bit suspicious.

Yahoo is reporting that GotGame, a networking portal for gamers, has released an independent browser application called Rogue. The newsworthiness doesn’t stem so much from the browser itself, but from the fact that insinuates itself into whatever game you’re playing and doesn’t require application-switching to use. So if you’re stuck doing some sandwich gaming, or just don’t feel like contributing to your PvP battleground (and don’t want to get caught), this is the application for you. It’s presently only compatible with a handful of games, but Rogue has it where it counts and integrates with several MMORPGs and other games where you frequently get stuck waiting.

This news comes at the same time as an interesting article over at Gamasutra about integrating YouTube video posting into game engines. The convergence of gaming, social networking, and user media may well swirl together into something fun.

This week has been a bit on the bloggy side here at Pixelsocks.com, so we thought we’d finish it off strong with a few PSAs.

If you’ve somehow missed out on the original Half-Life, valve is selling it for $0.99 right now. The seminal FPS was essentially the herald of modern FPS design, so in addition to being dirt cheap, the gameplay hasn’t aged overmuch. Give it an hour or two and find out just how much more of your free time that dollar will cost you. Get on it, though, the sale burns out at 12:00 PST today.

Speaking of seminal games, go check out Good Old Games. They digitally distribute DRM-free copies of older games for $5-$10 that have been rehabilitated to run on Vista and XP. It’s a good resource for catching up on gaming you missed the first time around.

Speaking of which, I need to go get a copy of Fallout. Please excuse me.

Pirates are heroes! Swashbucklers sailing on Nintendo’s Blue Ocean, they stand against unreasonable DRM, price gouging, distributor hegemony, and all that corporate bad stuff. That is, unless you happen to have released a DRM-free, cheap, independant game called World of Goo. In that case, they’re just thieves.

2D Boy (via Twenty-Sided), developers of the excellent tower construction game, have conducted an informal survey that compares the number of sales they’ve made to the number of IP addresses registering scores on their leaderboards. After doing some reasonable stats, they estimate the piracy rate for World of Goo is 82%. Put another way, only 18% of the players are actually paying for their game. The developers admit that it’s a rough estimate, but not an unreasonable one. So maybe most pirates aren’t so romantic as the vocal pirates would have you believe.

On the other hand, if you take from this that DRM is important to protect developers, that’s wrong too. 2D Boy also points out that a DRM-protected game, Ricochet Infinity, actually suffers a piracy rate of 92%. Adding insult to injury is the fact that pirates only rarely convert to paying paying customers. Although it’s difficult to make direct comparisons between different games with different audiences and market awareness, it’s difficult to ignore those numbers.

So if you happen to be a games distributor reading this news/review blog, ask yourself what you’re getting in exchange for the money and consumer goodwill you spend on DRM. On the other side of the fence, if you’ve pirated World of Goo and liked it, show 2D Boy $20 of your love.

This one’s all over the gaming press, but just in case you haven’t heard, here it is again. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization has pulled together to create a macabre flash-based parody of Cooking Mama called Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals. The game invites players to pluck, gut, stuff, cook, and process a thanksgiving turkey. The whole bloody ordeal is shown through the lens of Cooking Mama, so it’s not exactly disturbing, but it’s all presented as cartoonishly disgusting and gory.

Interestingly, PETA has chosen to provide some of their media as unlockable bonuses for completing the minigames. So, once you’ve finished butchering your bird, you can learn a little about how it’s done on a larger scale. Regardless of whether you love or hate PETA and its particular ethics, this is a win for video games as a medium, because substantial organizations are using them to share thoughts and ideals. Mama Kills Animals is a pretty cut-and-dry example that games are speech.

Our personal political agenda to prove games are speech aside, Mama Kills Animals is surprisingly competent parody. PETA has chosen to ape one of the DS’s breakout hits, and they haven’t ruined the gameplay by porting it to flash. Sawing your Turkey’s head off would still play better on the DS, but the mouse interface doesn’t keep the game from being fun for a playthrough, especially if you’re familiar with the original franchise. The art is spot-on, though the flash-driven animation is a little more South Park than anime.

Peta’s marketing psychologists seem to have done their homework as well. By making PETA’s media an unlockable, cognitive dissonance gives the group’s message some free credibility and appeal it might otherwise lack. All told, for weal or woe, Mama Kills Animals is a gaming landmark. Go check it out.

Persistent readers may recall that we reported on David Braben’s declaration of war against the used-games market. In case it’s just too hard to click the link, the short version was that he recommended tying purchases to particular consumers so they couldn’t be passed from person to person.

Although Baben hasn’t been heard from since then in gaming news, Nintendo seems to have listened. The upcoming Wii Speak peripheral will come with a “Wii download ticket number.” The peripheral amounts to a glorified speaker phone, but will at last bring voice chat to the Wii. The catch is that the peripheral won’t interact with most games except through the new Wii Speak Channel.

The more cynical among you will already have worked out that, without this number, Wii Speak owners won’t be able to download the Wii Speak channel for free. However you may not have guessed that the channel won’t be for sale at all, so that download number is your only access to the essential software.

Even if the download number doesn’t tie itself to a particular console once used, secondhand buyers will need to ensure that they’re getting the number with the peripheral. Otherwise it’ll be a useless hunk of plastic.

Just when you thought consoles were safe from intrusive DRM.

Edit: Gamesindustry.biz is reporting that the code is consumed by a single use.

Richard Garriott (Lord British of Ultima fame) will be giving up his position at NCsoft. The eccentric multimillionaire gaming personality had an epiphany during his TRIP INTO SPACE. Time away from earth evidently shifted Garriott’s priorities and he has chosen to pursue other interests.

The trip, named Operation Immortality, also served to carry the work and genetic information of modern geniuses like Dr. Steven Hawking and honorary DFA Steven Colbert into space. Our human representatives will be preserved for posterity on the International Space Station in case of a catastrophic extinction event. If you’re into MMORPGs, think of it as wipe protection for the species.

It’s no secret that Garriott’s most recent game with NCsoft, Tabula Rasa, was something of a flop, but fleeing to space seems somehow excessive. Seriously though, it’s difficult to imagine what Lord British’s next exploit will be now that he has singlehandedly saved humanity from extinction by becoming the sixth private citizen to fly into space.

There are no recovered addicts, just people who die before they relapse. Research from Blizzard (via gamesindustry.biz) shows that about half of Warhammer expatriates and nearly 70% of those who left for Age of Conan have returned to the warm embrace of Azeroth.

Players haven’t necessarily cancelled their other accounts, but the time demands of MMORPGs don’t exactly encourage playing multiple games unless you work at Massively. So it’s probably fair to guess that those players have actually shifted from game to game.

Player recidivism coincides with the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which will hit stores this week. Coincidence? Um, no.

Well, it’s finally happened. Some government has noticed that electronic currency is just scrip and they aren’t getting a piece of the action. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that China plans to levy a 20% tax on virtual earnings. Ostensibly, this tax targets currency resellers who buy currency from gamers and distribute it with a markup (think gold farmers). Not that China can really be blamed for its interest, seeing how 20% of $500,000,000 isn’t chump change. Of course, $500M is just from gold farming. Other vendors actually sell scrip that can be used for instant messenging, virtual goods, and pretty much the entire rainbow of virtual assets and services.

Interestingly, this tax seems to target only individual profits–companies are exempt. Worse still for the individual, if they cannot produce a receipt of sale, the government gets to determine the fair value of the transaction.

I wonder how feasible this will be. It seems like a tricky problem to track all these transactions and enforce the policy.