"Yikes: GameSpy Shutdown Will Affect A Lot Of Games"

Yep, the "future" of gaming has arrived. First it was Games For Windows Live, and now it's GameSpy. Well, I guess that's what happens when you rely on a "dedicated" third-party service to power your online/multiplayer shit rather than doing it yourself. Sure, it may have freed you up from having to run your own servers and all that jazz, but when the service arbitrarily goes down for good, you and your customers are just SOL at that point, unless you do something about it. So how many of those old ass games that I'm sure at least some people still play are going to have anything done with them to rectify this? We'll see, I guess. I fully expect to see more such aging services to shut down in the coming years.

*looks warily at the likes of Steam, Origin, and such, not to mention stuff like Xbox Live and Playstation Network* (NB4 cries of "You're being ridiculous! Steam will never, ever be shut down!")

I'm just glad that I hardly play multiplayer games at all, so this doesn't personally affect me. ¬_¬

"At Long Last, Video Game Aggression Linked To Losing, Not Violence"

I can confirm that this is true, anecdotally speaking at least. I've never gotten the urge to break things or kill people due to randomly murdering civilians in Grand Theft Auto or whatever, but I most certainly have become enraged when I've played long-ass missions in GTA games and then died just before completing them and then had to start over at the beginning and do it all again. But then, Luigi's Purple Coins in Super Mario Galaxy probably made me boil over more than anything in a GTA game ever did. So, essentially, the findings appear to be that super difficult (or crappily designed) games cause rage more so than excessively violent ones. To which I say, yeah, duh.

I've never thrown a controller in rage myself, but I... I've heard stories. >_>;