If you haven’t seen it yet I seriously recommend you check out Sega Fantasy VI, a brilliant little Flash video of the end of Final Fantasy VI remade with various classic consoles (and some not so classic) battling the nefarious PSP in its attempts to conquer the industry. It’s been doing the rounds on various gaming blogs over the last few days so give it a look, even if its length can be considered nothing short of arse-numbing. If you’re a sucker for old consoles and classic RPGs it’s definitely a must-see.

I thought that the US Constitution forbade cruel and unusual punishment. Still, better than going to jail.

We’ve known for a while that the Xbox 360 is running on IBM’s PowerPC architecture, the same as you’ll find in Macs, but I guess the notion that the easiest way for Microsoft to ship some alpha development kits out to developers would be to use Power Mac G5s escaped me. You have to admit that it’s a funny image to see Macs, complete with big Apple logos on the sides, with Microsoft labels and “Xenon” branding (English coverage on Kotaku and Engadget). I’ve heard that Microsoft has been known to lift from Apple but this takes the cake…

Guardian Unlimited is running an excellent article on FIFA Street as a microcosm of EA itself which you can find here. I’ve made my feelings clear about EA on many occasions and Keith Stuart has echoed many of my own feelings in a very insightful article. It possibly shows how the reviewers of games might not have as much influence over whether or not a game succeeds as we like to think we do.

I’m not the biggest fan of the old prebuilt PCs because I think they’ve overpriced and often lock people into proprietary hardware, and Alienware are one of the worst offenders in the first area at least. They also have the most hideous cases that I’ve ever seen, and when you lose on substance (not saying they don’t have power, but not as much as they make out) and have aesthetics against you there’s not a lot going in your favour. Still, they get some nice exclusive technology and are certainly better than the Dell’s of the world.

Anyway, the purpose of this wasn’t to bash Alienware but to draw attention to this, a rare thing of beauty from them. Those monstrosities of cases are horrible, but making anything black and slapping the Death Star on the side of it will improve it infinitely. It still wouldn’t make me buy one but if anyone wants to buy one for me you’re quite welcome.