Rule of Rose freaked me out, and I am a 6-foot-4 linebacker (in Madden NFL Football games).

You play as Jennifer, a young wretch orphaned in 1930s Britain. Jennifer is sent to a creepy orphanage where she’s set upon by a series of young malicious waifs who toss her in a coffin, tie her up, and force her to do their bidding.

After she’s dropped off at the orphanarium, Jennifer’s tale begins. “A mysterious, unthinkable, filthy tale.”

An Atlus representative has stated Rose has “something to emotionally scar every member of the family.”

Microsoft is putting power in the people’s hands. With the release of its XNA Game Toolset, people with programming skills and a creative vision will be able to make their own Xbox 360 titles.

Right now, the Windows XP SP2-based software is only in its beta release, meaning some very important features simply aren’t there yet, such as the ability to create games for the Xbox 360. Right now, only Windows game development is being supported.

Microsoft is offering two plans for developers who want to put their games on Xbox, and both are exceedingly reasonable. The final software should be available this holiday season and it’s likely we’ll all be seeing some of the best XNA-created games at least on Xbox 360 Live Arcade by the year’s end.

The revolution will be televised, it seems.

Spring 2007 is a long time, too long indeed, to wait for a game with a homicidal, diver-helmet wearing character named “Mr. Bubbles” in it.

The first-person shooter BioShock captured everyone’s hearts at this year’s E3. The creepy game features an ecology system where creatures play off one another for survival, and special “Plasmid” stations that give the player superpowers, much like my uncanny mutant ability to make 13 items seem like 12 at the supermarket’s express checkout line.

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This Wired article suggests the PlayStation 3 will make or break Sony.

It’s a hyperbolic argument, to be sure, but the writer does make some interesting points. He says, “But the megaproducts Sony has come up with, whether the AirBoard portable TV/Internet screen or the PS3, haven’t sought to fill some simple, unrecognized need, as the Walkman had done; they’ve sought to do many things in the best way imaginable. Simply reading their spec sheets is enough to make you suspect they were designed not to please customers but to beat Microsoft. They make you long for Nintendo’s Wii, a game console whose singular appeal is that it’ll be fun to play.”

As it stands now, the PlayStation 3 is a bloated, expensive game player. It’s utilizing proprietary Blu-Ray technology that might, just might, become as well used as Betamax. Its online service might not ever be as user-friendly as Microsoft. And its vaunted cell technology might not ever be fully realizing in, you know, an actual game.

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How weird is it watch a video of the new Indiana Jones game in German? Answer: More than you could possibly imagine. Check it out here.

Anyway, what scary German dude is talking about (and what’s shown in the video) here is Euphoria, a new system by which game characters are given a “nervous system” of sorts. When they’re introduced to stimuli (a punch, a rolling rope bridge), they’ll attempt to achieve equilibrium. An increased range of motions and object detection means characters will put their hands out for balance, or roll right over hoods. In short, the game will not react to two events in the exact same way. It can’t.

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It is indeed better to Burnout.

Electronic Arts announced today that developer Criterion is working on a next-generation version of its destruction-themed arcade racer Burnout. And this time, the incessant loading of game levels will be gone. The game will feature a huge, open world like that found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Saints Row, Scarface, etc.

The game also features “brand-new next-generation technology allowing gamers to literally rip their cars in half, in the most explosive pile-ups in the series� history,” sayeth Electronic Arts.

This new Burnout, bless its forever crashing, burning, exploding soul, will be out in 2007.

(This is not a Burnout 5 screen shot.)

This is Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis, the game — and I am not making this up — that tried to kill me.

Let us flash back to E3 2002. President George W. Bush taught us to fear pretzels. The Ivorian Civil War broke out in a place called Cote d’Ivoire, prompting me to check an atlas to see if someone wasn’t having fun at my expense. And, also, this happened.

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Microsoft has just announced its newest list of Xbox titles that are now playable on Xbox 360. And, Microsoft notes, there are some updates for titles already previously backward compatible.

August 2006 Back Compatible titles added/updated:

Aggressive Inline
Aquaman: Battle of Atlantis
All Star Baseball 2003
All Star Baseball 2005
Burnout 3: Takedown
Catwoman
Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart UPDATED
Counter Strike
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Dead to Rights
Digimon Rumble Arena 2 UPDATED
ESPN Major League Baseball
Fatal Frame 2
Ford vs. Chevy UPDATED
Freaky Flyers
Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows
Tom Clancy�s Ghost Recon - Island Thunder
Half Life 2 UPDATED
The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer UPDATED
IndyCar Series 2005
Kabuki Warrior UPDATED
Lego Star Wars II
Links 2004
Magatama UPDATED
Maximum Chase
Mortal Kombat: Deception UPDATED
MTX: Mototrax Featuring Travis Pastrana
Namco Museum 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection
MX vs. ATV Unleashed
Outlaw Tennis
Over the Hedge
Sid Meier’s Pirates
Richard Burns Rally
Rogue Trooper
Serious Sam
Shincho Mahjong (SIC)
Smashing Drive
Sneakers UPDATED
Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run
The Legend of Spyro: A Beginning
TAZ: Wanted
True Crime Streets of LA
The Suffering
Trigger Man
Torino Winter Olympics 2006
Vietcong
Wrath Unleashed
X-Men II: Wolverine’s Revenge

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Watching Viva Pi�ata on the television Saturday morning, I was reminded of Richie Ashburn sitting out there in the old Polo Grounds’ center field. Ashburn, who was a pretty darn good baseball player with pretty bad luck, was, at the end of his career, shagging flies for the 1962 New York Mets. The 1962 Mets were largely considered to be the worst professional team ever fielded, and Ashburn was their best player.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but I know I’ve never seen it before.”

So. Franklin Fizzlybear wanted the Buzzlegums to build hives on his property, and then the gang planted a jewel tree because they heard the mythical Chewincorns liked their sweet, sweet jewels, and all the time I was watching this show, I felt vaguely like I should be buying something, anything.

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One of the biggest highlights of the Leipzig Games Convention (further investigation reveals Leipzig is, in fact, an actual place and that is most definitely not inside the United States of America) was Blizzard’s announcement that its popular World of WarCraft massively multiplayer online role-playing game will get yearly expansions once World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade becomes available.

And more good news? The company plans a big announcement in 2007, which will likely be StarCraft 2 for PCs and a revived, next-generation StarCraft: Ghost for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.