Okay, I admit it: I have a strong tendency to assign to blame for every gaming- related crime I hear about to Grand Theft Auto. I don’t know why, I just do.

Thankfully, though, this one doesn’t seem to have a GTA connection, just a Lame Pathetic Crook connection.

The guy walks into a video game store, asks to see an XBox 360, then lifts up his sweater to show the pistol stuck in his pants, and walks off with the console and just two games. Yes, just two.

Interesting tidbit from the World News Network… they claim that in the Asia Pacific region, online activity is on the uptick with online gaming leading the way, while online video and music fall to the wayside due to rampant piracy.

Hm. Maybe online audio and video execs could learn something from the gaming industry about how to protect their products from piracy.

You can read the full article here.

It’s interesting to me that the PC game version of the latest Narnia film, “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” is being released before the film actually comes out in theaters.

Could it be that the publisher expects demand to be so great that players will want their Prince Caspian fix any which way they can get it? Or is this just another one of those throwaway obligatory movie-to-game ports that no one cares about?

A recent study by an Australian Psychology graduate suggests that gaming addicts, for all their shortcomings, are not the antisocial nerds we tend to make them out to be.

Of the 621 adult respondents to the study, 15% calimed to spend more that 50 hours a week playing video games, but only 1 percent exhibited behaviors like poor social skills and low-self esteem.

One caveat is that the survey was done online, where people tend to be less shy any way.

If you haven’t heard about Video Games Live, it’s just about the coolest concert series there is. They play video game music, live, on a full-on classical orchestra with all the works, hi-tech lights show and everything. It’s one of those few gaming-related things (like conventions and such) that simple cannot be recreated as a home experience.

Video Games Live will be playing in Las Vegas for the first time ever, and will be premiering music from that beloved and genre-defining series, Command & Conquer.

For more info:

VIDEO GAMES LIVE
LAS VEGAS/HENDERSON, NEVADA
SATURDAY, JUNE 24TH, 2008 – 8:00PM
HENDERSON PAVILION
LAS VEGAS PHILHARMONIC
TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE!!

Gaming is such a broad and complex world, full of accomplishments and human achievement, that the people behind the Guinness Book of World Records has an edition of records dedicated purely to gaming-related stuff.

The Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2008 is now available and if you forgot to give your gamer dad something for Father’s Day, this might do the trick.

I don’t play very many fighting games anymore, but if it’s Street Fighter-related I’m all ears. Or in this case eyes.

It’s Street Fighter 4! It isn’t really the fourth installment, but what the heck?

And what with all the hubbub about that other megafranchise that sports the number four (GTA4, for the hopelessly underinformed), perhaps some of that four-play will rub off on this venerable and hopefully still important, series.

Click here to see the trailer.

The Nintendo Wii, Microsoft’s XBox 360, and the Sony Playstation 3 all contain too much bromine, according to environmental watchdog group Greenpeace.

Bromide is classified by Greenpeace as a chemical that’s hazardous to the environment,and the PS3 had the highest levels of it.

The XBox and PS3 also had beryllium-containing alloys, which Greenpeace found worrisome. All three video game companies were urged to phase out dangerous chemicals from their products.

Gamestop says it decided to cease Zune sales because it wasn’t a gaming gadget. It has been selling Zune, however since 2006, when the gadget first launched.

Gates and co., though, have thus far shrugged the snub off, saying the Zune has a “strong presence” at other retail chains.

Carnegie Melon University researchers hope that gamers visiting their new website, www.gwap.com, can help make computers smarter. How? By playing online games.

For example, in the game “Tag a tune”, humans add tags to describe whether audio clips are “sad”, and so on. This helps computers learn to do stuff better, like image and audio clip searches.

Using online games like “Tag a tune”, the researchers hope to study further how humans can help computers do things they (the computers) aren’t very good at.