Good news for the Nintendo fan boys. Over the holidays of 2003 Gamecube sales rose from its previous year over 70 percent. Over all Nintendo’s Gamecube showed a 35 percent growth in sales throughout the year. Sony actually dropped 25 percent and Xbox showed no real change as far as total sales go.

While the price drop and bundle packages are obviously helping out, the question remains does Nintendo have the titles coming out? 2004 already has people thinking this is the year Xbox will blow up with its release lineup. It will be interesting to see the console wars of 2004. All the while, we benefit from the big three sparring it out. Well our bank accounts don’t, but you get the idea.

I am sure at one point or another you have heard me talk about Child’s Play, the toy drive that was run by Penny Arcade this past Christmas. If you remember my original post about that toy drive then you will know that it was spurred by an article written by a man named Bill France. Mr. France is a writer for Heraldnet.com and the article in question went on to describe that video games were a sort of “traning program” for children. This training as you can probably already figure out was training to kill people. I can’t make assumptions on where Mr. France developed this idea or what his justification was for writing a column on the topic, but I can tell you that it stirred up a whirlwind of controversy in gaming communities around the globe. I am sure Mr. France also received a hefty amount of hate mail along with email updating him on the immense success of Child’s Play as it happened.

Looking back I felt somewhat sorry for Mr. France and I have gained a new level of respect for him and I will tell you why. Mr. France has written a follow up article of sorts and it is now online. Instead of the sort of response you would expect from most journalists who had been attacked by a large pack of rabid gamers, Mr. France apologized for making it seem like gamers were bad people. He acknowledged the wonderful things that this particular gaming community had done and how fast they had worked to accomplish such a lofty goal. I encourage you all to read the article and I fully believe that this is one step toward changing the overall stereotype that gamers are killing machines. If we had more journalists who showed their true colors as human beings instead of trying to keep some sort of reputation then it would make this battle a whole lot easier, but we don’t. As I wind this down I just want to applaud Bill France for doing what most journalists and people in the limelight would never do, admit they were wrong. Here is to hoping that we can continue to show that video games are not the evil stepchild of entertainment that the mass media would have you believe, one journailst at a time.

In a very strange story I found today, copies of Half Life 2 have begun surfacing on the Russian market. Do you remember the leaked source code? Apparently someone made the code playable and even translated it into Russian and have proceeded to sell copies of the “completed” game. No statement has been released from Valve at this point.

I am sure many of you already heard that Infinium Labs officially showed off the Phantom in the Embeded Windows booth at CES this week. The unfortunate part is that they didn’t bother to turn it on and give any sort of demo….

We are working on changing the direction of the site. No need to fear we will still be committed to being a “gaming community”. We are just optimizing things as it were right now, stay tuned for some really great stuff ahead. Trust us, Snackbar Games will be all that and a bag of chips.