(It’s Short-Term Memory Week, a celebration of earlier Multiplayer posts with full-sized updates. Today: remember… January 19th and February 20th?)

My dimmest ideas? OK. That's false modesty. I've gone on-record a couple of times suggesting a video game idea.

I wanted to give you an update during this theme week about what happened to them.

Guess what? They're coming true.

Sort of.

On January 19th, I wrote a report about "SSX Blur" and mentioned an idea I had about how EA could include Miis into their realistic games. I tried it on "SSX" producer Eric Chartrand:

I suggested that a realistic-looking "Need for Speed" could get around that by fashioning a player's Mii as an ornament hanging from a rearview mirror. He smiled a smile I inferred meant I should retain my day job.

EA has yet to announce a Mii hood ornament feature or anything of the sort. But someone else must have been thinking about that kind of thing. I was playing "Metroid Prime 3" recently and went to the Extras menu. Lo and behold, the game will let you unlock a Mii bobblehead, which, I think -- I haven't unlocked it yet -- will appear in the cockpit of Samus ship. That's one!

Then in February I suggested that Microsoft rig the Xbox 360 Vision camera so that it snaps a photo of the player every time they score an Achievement. I wrote:

We’d wind up with a visual chronicle of the time I’d spent at any given game. There’d be shots of me bright-eyed and thrilled, winning an Achievement for completing the first section of “Halo 3,” followed by a photo of me slouched lower in my seat, winning the Achievement for advancing to another section of the game. There would be a picture of me bleary-eyed next to an Achievement for finishing the game. There’d be ones for me winning various multiplayer Achievements, the photos snapped across several months and showcasing subtle changes in my hairstyle and the décor of my apartment.

Over at the 5WG website, blogger Shawn Drotar made it clear that my idea had some flaws:

After all, I’ve earned hundreds of Achievements, and my Gamerscore isn’t even all that high because I rarely have time to finish a game. 95% of those hundreds of would-be photos would look essentially the same, though some might have one of my dogs walking in front of the camera to mix things up.

Shawn made a good point, though I still thought that my concept could be offered by Microsoft as an option. Couldn't they at least use it as a sneaky way to convince people they need to buy bigger hard-drives?

Ah, but at E3 this summer, I got some sort of vindication when developer Alex Ward demoed "Burnout Paradise" for me and showed me what a smart game developer does with the kind of thing I was thinking about. I reported:

A less-discussed "Burnout: Paradise" feature uses the PlayStation Eye USB camera to snap a photo of a player whose online opponents have sent him or her crashing. Criterion Creative Director Alex Ward told GameFile to think of the snapped photos as the equivalent of marks on a fighter plane tallying an ace's victories. He was showing the game on PS3 (it's also slated for the Xbox 360) and said he expects the system to hold up to 2,500 photos. That's a lot of shame to log.

That's two!

Am I on a streak? I was given a demo for the PlayStation 3 downloadable game "Pain" earlier this week. The game is all about shooting people off city walls and through panes of glass, by firing them out of a giant slingshot. I told the game's producer that it would be funny if the Sony developers let you put an Xbox 360 in that slingshot.

Everyone laughed.

That's three? Somehow I doubt it.

Tiger Woods

Sure, I talked to him about that game, which has some cool features.
But I also needed a "Resident Evil 4" update, since he said he'd been playing that when I interviewed him two years ago for one of his games.

You can read him talk about the game and his gaming habits at MTVNews.com. (Though maybe I didn't need to tell the world about how his sweaty hands affect his Wii playing? Not sure.)

Anyway, his "RE4" answer, from my article:

"I haven't played 'Resident Evil' in a while, so I finished the game and off to the next challenge." He played on medium difficulty. Not easy mode? "That's not a question."

I highlight this bit because I've been talking to some friends (including Croal) lately about the prospect of playing through games on easy mode. Most won't lower themselves to do it. But we're now out a month from "Halo 3" and I want to re-play the first two games. How to do that quickly? I'm going to play them on easy.

At least I thought I would. But now that I type it, it feels wrong.

Is there ever a right situation for playing on easy?