The normally Grumpy Gamer has gotten into the spirit with a most excellent send-up of the perennial holiday favorite, The Twelve Days of Christmas. Entitled The Twelve Days of Crunch Time, it features components from the average game development experience. The last element of the piece goes up tomorrow.

bgalbraith writes "BBC News has posted an editorial piece called Confessions of a Game Widow, where a frustrated spouse writes about getting neglected by her partner in favor of games such as Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. Her solution to all those like her: 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Let's get together and form a clan. We can call ourselves the Game Widows.'"

aws910 writes "An interesting story at news.com.com tells of the various efforts employed by various MMOG companies to abate the problem of Griefers." From the article: "Social miscreants can do more than ruin the game for better-behaved competitors. They can hurt game companies' bottom line by driving away customers and burning up support lines. Problems related to grief players often account for 25 percent or more of customer service calls, according to game publishers." Commentary from the old men of MMOGdom available at Broken Toys and Terra Nova.

bryhhh writes "Valve has announced that they have banned another 30,000 steam accounts which had been used to try to illegally gain access to Valve games without a valid purchase. Only last month 20,000 accounts were banned for the same reason, only this time Valve states that, 'The accounts that are disabled today will not be reactivated'."

A week's worth of WoW news to share. Last weekend saw the first anti-Ebaying lawsuit as Blizzard makes good on it's claim. This week they've released a patch for the game, adding in new content and unleashing the Holidays on Azeroth. Blizzard has also put up an intriguing preview of PvP Battlegrounds. From that article: "Lower-level players who wanted to contribute in other ways to the battle could also do so by undertaking PvP-related quests, such as capturing wolves or rams to provide mounts for cavalry charges, claiming a nearby mine and ferrying resources back to the main base to upgrade allied troops, or capturing enemy graveyards to lengthen the run back to the frontlines for revived adversaries."

pluke writes "Computer and Video Games reports that Nintendo plans to drop the humble d-pad from its next console along with the classic A and B buttons. Nintendo pioneered the d-pad on its 80's Game & Watch handheld games system."

An anonymous reader writes "CNN/Money's Game Over column looks at some of the gaming trends of 2004, including the prevalence of sex and sequels. Writer Chris Morris provides some follow-up as well, discussing the sad, sad sales numbers of "Singles," "The Guy Game" and "Leisure Suit Larry"; the odds of another Playboy magazine video game girls layout and whatever happened to the ApeXtreme." Gamespot has a nice Year in Review piece as well, and we've already previously mentioned Grimwell.com's MMORPG Year in Review.

Several readers have written in to report on Tuesday's lawsuit regarding 'The Guy Game'. The PC/console offering, which strings a weak trivia game around footage of naked college age girls, has come under fire after the revelation that a woman featured prominently in the game was under the age of 18 at the time the footage was taken. The lawsuit names Sony (PS2), Microsoft (Xbox), Take-Two Interactive (Publisher), and Top Heavy Studios (Developer) as defendants. Commentary available on GamesIndustry.biz.

We continue today our co-hosting of Penny Arcade's Holiday strip series "The Last Christmas". If you haven't seen the gaping maw of comics 1 or 2, make sure to do that before you check out Gabe and Tycho's latest.

kazama writes "Settlers of Catan, the very popular board game by Klaus Teuber, is now available from the MSN Games zone for free offline play and $30 for online play. Screen shots look comparable to the version by Capcom in Japan but we shall see how good it is when you need the 3:1 port."

PuppiesOnAcid writes "Although the NFL buckled under EA's mighty stronghold in the video game football market (Madden), the NBA has chosen to reject EA's exclusive rights deal. Jon Robinson explains, 'One of the reasons is that the NBA Live series simply doesn't have a stranglehold on the market the way Madden has for years, so by signing an exclusive deal with EA, the NBA would actually be losing money.'"

Omniscientist writes "Just when you thought your Series 60 smartphones were safe, a trojan has surfaced with a two-pronged attack that also in turn disables any anti-virus protection available. Infosyncworld has news about a trojan masquerading itself as a port for the Metal Gear game that disables all anti-virus software on the phone and other necessary utilities like file managers. Also, it affects other phones nearby it via Bluetooth. This trojan has been dubbed 'Metal Gear.a,' quite aptly."

Sebastian writes "C64 DTV has been out for just under a month now and the Modders and Hackers have been hard at work. Here is a website dedicated to C64DTV modding. This one has nice pictures of the inns of C64 DTV and even some easter eggs."

Darragh_IRL writes "In true Christmas spirit, Rockstar Games has released the PC version of GTA2 for free on their website." From the page: "GTA2 expanded on the top-down, open-ended crime world gameplay formula with a host of new features including the advent of multiple rival gangs - seven, to be exact, including the Yakuza, Scientists, Looneys, Rednecks, Zaibatsu, the Russian Mob and Hare Krishnas. Earn your respect with each gang. Reap the benefits with all manner of shady work-for-hire gigs contracted your way. And climb your way to the top of the criminal pile."

The Grumpy Gamer has a counterpoint to the oft mentioned argument that the games industry is bigger business than the movie industry. From the article: "The domestic US box office is estimated to be around $9B for 2004, and this is where the myth starts to take life. The problem is the movie industry is a lot bigger then just the U.S. box office. DVD sales and rentals for 2003 topped $16B. VHS sales and rentals for 2003 was $6.4B. VHS sales are declining fast, but most of that will just shift over to DVDs, which brings the grand total for non-box office movie sales to over $20B, twice the figure for the entire game industry."

We reported last week on EA's bid on DICE, the makers of BF1942, and their lack of success at winning the shareholders over. This week GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that EA has revised the proposal in hopes of swaying those finicky stockholders. From the article: "However, EA's latest move conditions the offer upon a lower acceptance level of more than 50 per cent of the total number of shares - representing more than 50 per cent of the capital and votes in DICE after dilution due to an employee option programme launched in 2002." Update: 12/21 19:18 GMT by Z : Fixed broken link.

HomeLAN has details on newly available demos of two of the most interesting late-2004 releases. The folks over at Valve have released a Half-Life 2 demo, available where you download stuff, and FilePlanet has available a demo version of Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed should you want to try it out for 10 days.

Drakken writes "GamesAreFun.com is reporting that Chunsoft has updated their Homeland website with three new movies, two of them showing off online play. For awhile, Homeland (a GameCube MMORPG) was thought to be cancelled, but it seems it's alive again. This is significant because Homeland will be only the second-ever online GameCube game, making use of the GC's broadband adapter." Probably a JP only release.

bippy writes "Tired of hearing about all the bad things games do? I've mirrored a list on Kotaku of recent positive research done into gaming. All told, the list includes six studies and books summarized into bite-sized morsels with quotes and links. Finally, something to throw in the face of all those obnoxious politicians and sue-happy lawyers."

Coolnat2004 asks: "I'm a high school student and a member of our technology group. Our school needs extra money for our technology, and I thought that a LAN party would be an effective, and exciting, solution. How can we make a great LAN party with the supplies at hand and make a profit while doing it? We have a network, but not a large enough room with enough ports. We're most likely going to create a detached network for the party, but don't know how to set it up because we have limited supplies. I guess we could seek a sponsorship from a local company, but that is unlikely to happen. Any suggestions on network layout, power layout, and general party to-do's?"