So, I’m done with my dissertation now. With any luck, Pixelsocks.com will now feature weekly reviews as well as a newsy (or at least bloggy) something on MWF.

Edu-gaming is heading to Kenya as Warner Bros. will be releasing Pamoja Mtaani (“Together in the Hood”). It was developed by Virtual Heroes Inc., a serious games developer with a history of medical sims and other educational tools. The game follows a musician, athlete, tech nerd, socialite, and med student as they travel through east Africa to reclaim stolen goods and help an injured woman.

Each avatar has a character flaw that corresponds to an AIDS risk, and correcting this flaw as a game objective delivers the core message. However, that message may be regarded as pedantic in light of the fact that three of the five character goals essentially boil down to “avoid sex.” Check here for more details.

The game does make some effort to ingratiate itself with its target audience. Of particular note is that each avatar is controlled by a different player. The social atmosphere may foster communication between players about the issues embedded in the game, or at least put the players at their ease.

It should be interesting to see which parts work and which don’t.

Torrentfreak, a filesharing blog with a focus on Bittorrent, has posted a quick stat dump for the most pirated video games of 2008. Although they don’t explicitly unpack how the stats were obtained, a quick trek through their ancestral links suggests that they directly query from the torrent trackers at popular websites like The Pirate Bay.

Will Wright, famed creator of pretty much any game with the prefix “Sim,” wins for most pirate-able developer. His sim-everything game Spore graces the top of the list, followed by his casual mega-hit The Sims 2. Between these two games, Will Wright holds a commanding 37% download lead over his closest follower, Assassin’s Creed.

Spore earlier stirred up a gamer outcry over its draconian SecuRom DRM scheme, which limited consumers to three installs per purchase. Although there’s no provable causal link between the the game’s arduous DRM and extensive piracy, SecuRom doesn’t seem to have spared Spore from seeing the top of this list.

Spore’s primacy is also surprising in light of the fact it was released just this year in September. Looking at the list, 6 of the top 10 games were released one or more years ago. This shouldn’t be surprising as the previous year’s holiday games are the banner titles that everyone wants to pirate. What is surprising, however, is that Spore overran them all in just two months.

Outside Spore, the list is pretty diverse. No single genre is represented by more than two games. Four of the games are more than 40 hours long or are open-ended, while none of them are shorter than 6 hours (though your mileage may vary). Most games are from the last two years, but The Sims 2 and GTA: San Andreas appear to have some staying power.

In short, even limited to the highest volumes, Piracy appears to be largely unfocused (unless you count AAA games as a focus), unless your name is Will Wright. Congratulations to Mr. Wright on his popularity, I guess.

Insightful and evidently snarky game criticism blog, Lens of Truth, has posted a Street Fighter II 15 year retrospective. If you’re wondering how a single game (a sequel, no less) can span 20 years and only just now be coming out on XBLA, this article is for you.

While you’re there, check out the 90-second movie for some comparative shots of Street Fighter II over the years. Longtime gamers who know exactly what that movie will contain can skip it, but everyone else is guaranteed some insight into how the industry (and Capcom in particular) ticks. Watch it in HD for bonus enlightenment. While riding that wave to Nirvana, try to avoid thinking about they cycle of remakes and how that leads to suffering in your wallet.

Console sales have long been a painful exercise where the manufacturer takes a monetary hit on every unit sold. They then cross their fingers and hope to make up the difference on first party software titles and licensing fees–not a bad bet considering the low cost of printing and distributing games and the high cost at the point of sale.

The gaming press has long portrayed Nintendo as the exception to this rule, but only just recently has Forbes placed its money at its media mouth and estimated the Wii’s console profit margin at $6. Given that the Wii has a comparable market penetration to Sony’s Playstation 3 and about half that of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Nintendo must be sitting pretty on that profit margin.

This news comes at about the same time as a gamesindustry.biz observation that the Wii is the hottest thing on Ebay since the terms of use made it illegal to sell and ship fire. The console is currently asking $100 over its MSRP on the popular auctioneering site. It’s almost as though Nintendo is stepping on its own long tail by starving the American market so close to the holiday sales season.

Seminal 2D multiplayer fighting game Street Fighter 2 has finally emerged from its remake cocoon and emerged as a beautiful HD butterfly. Despite initial skepticism from fans and journalists alike, the game has enjoyed thus far universal praise.

The updated soundtrack has gone largely unsung until now, however. 1up is reporting that OC ReMix, a website dedicated to hosting fan arrangements of video game soundtracks, has published all the tracks for free. Better still, the tracks were written by OC ReMix’s own community. According to the website:

HD Remix is the first major video game with a completely fan-made soundtrack. More than twenty gamers from around the world contributed remixes of the original Street Fighter games’ music for inclusion in the updated game, in styles including jazz, hip-hop, reggaeton, spaghetti western, garage rock, big beat and electronica.

The last time the fan community contributed this much to the final release of a game was probably the professional adaptation of the Counter-Strike mod. Our congratulations go out to the OC EeMix community for the new milestone in gamer community deveopment.

If you grab the soundtrack and like what you hear, go check out the rest of OC ReMix. There’s a lot more where that came from.

It looks like Nintendo has no intention of shutting out the used games market after all. Although the Wii Speak peripheral will come with the previously reported activation code, evidently you can get a replacement by contacting consumer service.

This news comes on the heels of impassioned rhetoric from both sides of the used games debate. Developers have contended that used games sales hurt developers by locking them out of the purchasing process, while retailers point out that consumers expect their games to have residual value and store credit can be turned toward new games.

So where do you fall? Is the $5 you save at Gamestop worth cutting out the people who made it in the first place, or does the $60 price tag make you less sympathetic for the developers’ plight?