It's always nice to see people look to see if there actually are problems, rather than insisting they exist with no proof and no interest in finding out why, or if they exist at all. One the one hand you've got the House of Representatives trying to fix the "problem" with legislation that would require adults to show photo identification in order to purchase 'M'-rated video games. It probably didn't occur to Representatives Terry or Matheson that such laws might not be required in the first place, nor do they care if it places an unconstitutional and unreasonable burden on adults trying things they are entitled to have.

Take-Two has claimed $500 million in first-week sales for Grand Theft Auto IV, above expectations by some, probably just about right for others, but very impressive regardless. On the other hand, are meeting expectations really all that much to celebrate? If you want to continue the flawed comparison of video games to movies, it's not really all that different in that specific instance. Everyone expected GTA IV to make a killing and it did. Everyone expected Spider-Man 3 to make a killing, and it did. Good for Take-Two and Rockstar, they've certainly taken a beating by video game/movie violence ambulance chasers and morally oppressive politicians that like to waste money. But really all they did is what they were expected to do.

Here's a list of the Top 5 most read posts for April of 2008. Other pages got more views than this, but they weren't published in April so I've left them off the list to keep these things filled with fresh content. Feel free to comment on anything you see here and get a discussion going, or to link up. I'd appreciate it.

Reflecting on Battlestar Galactica's journey
Written before the final season premier of Battlestar Galactica. While I'm happy the show is back, I've fallen behind the most recent four episodes and I'm not feeling any rush or anticipation to get back into it. That's not good for them, so what's missing from the recipe?

I'm not looking forward to J. J. Abrams Trek film next year for a couple of reasons. Chief amongst them is that it's really hard to do good Trek, no matter who you are. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have been doing Trek shows and films for a very long time, and for the most part, I consider them -- the unassailable stewards of the franchise up until recently -- to be complete and utter failures.

Understand though, I respect and enjoy Berman as a writer. Although most episodes are a product of the room, they've all got to begin somewhere and written by somebody, and for the episodes Berman has credit on with The Next Generation, I have very favorable feelings about them. But as a Trek showrunner and exec-prod, I think that's not a job that suits him.

Just noting something that should be pretty self evident by now: Sony's Blu-ray hasn't filled the void left by having its only competitor in the business of high definition video storage implode due to questionable circumstances. Sony ragged on Microsoft for lobbing money at Paramount to stick with HD-DVD and then supposedly paid Warner Brothers over $200 million to get off the fence in its favor, which is really what killed HD-DVD. It had little to do with consumer preference, which actually leaned towards HD-DVD by most metrics.

But the fact that Blu-ray hasn't doubled sales as one would reasonably expect with the collapse of its only competitor -- or at least swung strongly upwards -- kind of says a lot about the weak market for HD hardware, mostly because high-def TV's are still big ticket items for most Americans, especially since the country is in a recession. But it also bursts the balloon called the high-def "war."

Turns out the war was only in the imaginations of the media and the companies sitting on opposing sides of fairly typical market competition. We don't ever say there's a war between GM and Ford, do we? Just a couple of companies doing the same thing, which was the same here. Oddly, according to Ars, Blu-ray sales were actually in the process of collapsing all on its own in the first quarter. That said, I still reject the theory that pseudo-HD downloads are having any significant impact on hard media now, or in the future.

It's a funny parallel if you ask me, and symptomatic of a larger problem with reporting over the past seven years. That tendency to exaggerate everything under the sun just to get attention has led to a popular consensus that flies in the face of reality. There was no HD war outside of the world of the pundit, were traditional single-movie DVD sales were an order of magnitude higher than all HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc sales combined. Blu-ray player sales apparently took a nose dive in the first quarter of 2008 and outside of satellite, even HD television is still crap shoot.

In the April 29th edition of In Brief, I laughed off the notion that Rockstar's GTA IV release would threaten Marvel/Paramount's Iron Man financially. We're not talking about comparing the gross of the two here, but saying that because lots of people were going out and dropping almost $50 on GTA IV on a Tuesday, that fewer people would go out and pay $10 to watch Iron Man Thur-Sunday as a result.

Films have a much wider audience than video games do and the fact that blockbuster-sized games are more of an oddity than the norm kind of proves the point without having to even look at the entire deal all that closely. There probably won't be another game in GTA IV or Halo's league this year, and maybe not next year either. Games like this are taking 3+ years to develop while you can -- with some compromises -- shoot three movies in that time span and reap three times the profit.

I've been trying to ignore it but the time has come to hand out some credit to Iron Man. Deadline Hollywood is predicting a mammoth $75+ million opening this weekend and the flick is getting some very good reviews. Wil got an early preview and says "it's the best comic book movie since Sin City, and blows Transformers and the last two X-Men movies into oblivion." At first I thought that was pretty high praise, but then I realized that the last two X-Men sequels sucked and that Transformers has never been complimented as being high-art. It made ridiculous amounts of money -- they all did -- but when has that ever been a metric of quality? I could have Frank Miller shit in his hat or, if you don't know who he is, put an Apple sticker on my crap, and retire right then and there just off the accumulated interest.

What I wonder is if people would put Marvel's self-financed flick on the same level as Sin City, because if that's the case, then this is obviously a pretty big deal. Why? Because we're talking about one of the best films ever as far as I'm concerned, and as an unfortunate side effect -- not unlike allergy meds that make you bleed on the inside and lose all your hair before you finally die in agony just so you can stop sneezing -- it reminds us that we haven't had more Sin City since 2005. It also happens to be the first big flick for Robert Downey Jr. since god knows when and comes right before the release of Tropic Thunder, giving his career two huge shots in a matter of months.

Also answered apparently is the question of whether or not a comic/graphic novel can exceed its source material in quality. Says io9 -- thanks Wil for the link since I can't seem to tolerate reading most of their junk myself -- the answer is an enthusiastic yes.

With all things pointing green (big stacks) for Iron Man, I can't help but feel a little left out in the cold here. None of the trailers I've seen have drawn me in because for all the hype and praise, I still don't know what the movie is about. That's fine for cable and network syndication and even rental, but when you're spending $10 for the ticket, $10 for a $1 drink, and $3 in gas, I think they need to work a little harder at the pitch.

GTA IV has been released; cue moral outrage over video game violence. MTV's gaming blog writes that Matt Damon pulled his support from the official game based on the movies which are based on the books. Amusingly if you're saying the game is too violent, then what you're really saying is that the movies were too violent -- which is partly his fault -- and that the books were too violent (seriously?) and apparently all three are in appropriate for kids. I would agree on some level that neither the films nor the game are probably appropriate for preteens, but what does that say about the books then?

I still have no idea how I want to format these kinds of posts, so I'm going to just keep trying new things and then old things and then some new things again until I'm happy. You'll just have to suffer through it. Sorry. Here, have a cookie or something. (Here are some things I'm reading that you should read too.)

'Rookie' Webisodes provide fix for '24' fans  (Reuters)**

Latest Hollywood script deals (Reuters)

TV crews still hurting from WGA strike (TV Squad)

I forgot about this, otherwise I would have worked it into my post earlier today about GTA IV. Jack Thompson is well known to games as an out-of-control morally conservative and all around lawsuit trolling lawyer that has waged a crusade against Take-Two interactive over games created by Rockstar, the studio responsible for the Grand Theft Auto series and Bully, along with titles from Ripcord Games.

Thompson's record of crazy is well documented in his Wiki bio that for the most part is about as accurate as you can get. He goes further than most in speculating -- without empirical evidence of any kind -- that video games featuring sex and violence are harmful to kids. Amusingly the video game industry generally agrees, which is why titles like GTA IV are rated 'M' for mature, meaning nobody under 17 is allowed to buy the game in stores.

I'll probably talk some more about GTA IV sales once some firm numbers come in, since the invariable comparison to Halo 3 and some feature films will need debunking. Until then, I linked to some great common sense and informative comments by industry player Keith Boesky yesterday and Wil Wheaton has some insightful thoughts today on the moral outrage over a video game that isn't meant for and can't even be legally sold to kids anywhere in the country. To put things in perspective, Keith says that 'M' rated games made up less than one-quarter of video game sales last year and that these games wouldn't have harmful effects on kids if their parents would stop buying them in the first place.

This snippet is from Wil's PAX keynote speech:

Speaking of parents and children and video games and opportunistic, pandering politicians: it's none of their fucking business what I choose to play with my kids, and I wish they'd stop trying to tell me - and everyone else by extension - what my kids can and can't play. I didn't let my kids play violent or graphic games when they were too young to understand what the game was about because I'm a good parent who is involved in his kids' lives, not because some idiot politician tried to score easy political points with the authoritarian 20 percenters who think censorship is totally awesome.

These things ought to be plainly obvious by now. Legislation to regulate video games when they are already regulated effectively by the industry are about not much more than vote pandering to moral conservatives whose imaginations are probably a lot worse than these games are. Most every state law seeking to regulate games has been struck down for being unconstitutional violations of free speech, with some states using money from welfare programs to pay for their expensively and spectacularly failed lawsuits that followed. Couldn't this money and our politicians' time be better spent?

UPDATE -- Serial lawsuit troll Jack Thompson is once again trying to get Take-Two's games taken off the shelves. "Thompson sent a copy of the letter to Ars Technica, and his demands are far-reaching. "Indictments should be returned against Take Two corporately and its Chairman, Strauss Zelnick, along with other Take Two officers. Indictment should also be against Sony and Microsoft which are making this pornographic game available to minors, and openly so, on their PS3 and Xbox systems," Thompson wrote. "Further, indictments should be handed down against Wal-Mart, Best Buy, GameStop, and all other retailers distributing this game to minors at their retail stores, openly, to kids who are only seventeen."" GTA IV is rated 'M' for mature so stores can't and won't sell it to actual kids, and somebody ought to tell Thompson that 17-year-olds are not kids. Hell, these days even 15-year-olds aren't kids anymore.

If you aren't a geek then you probably don't know who this is. Hans Reiser is a software and file system developer that was charged with the murder of his wife some time ago. You can get the gist of who he is and what he's done by following that link to his Wiki page, but skipping to the important part: a jury just found him guilty. You may not care and actually neither do I on any emotional level, other than to say that I think his conviction is a travesty and representative of the primary flaw in any legal system, which is leaving ultimate judgment up to human beings.

I'm saying this because Resier's wife -- Nina Reiser -- is currently missing. That's right, nobody knows where she is and yet somehow a jury has decided unanimously that not only is she dead, but that her husband killed her. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but that's not the burden of proof in the United States justice system. Last time I checked, the burden in criminal cases is "beyond a shadow of a doubt", and I would ask these retards how you can prove a murder beyond a shadow of a doubt when you can't even prove the supposed victim is dead in the first place. Reiser's wife could show up any day for all any of them knows and sadly this happens with disturbing regularity. We may have a very high opinion of our justice system in this country, but it has its flaws, and pretty damn severe ones at that when someone can be found guilty of murder (and perhaps even executed) without proof anyone died to begin with.

Either way, it's a sad, sad story. These people had kids that now have no parents at all, and for that I actually blame the injustice system for locking away their father for life with no actual proof than he did anything wrong. I apologize for ranting on off-topic subjects, but if cases like this aren't a miscarriage of justice, then I don't know what is.

There's some new House and Bones on tonight if you'll remember that they were shifted to Monday nights from Tuesday for some odd reason. Here's a message from Dr. House himself just in case you were thinking of skipping out on him tonight.

One of my readers and fellow blogger Morjana sent me a note this morning letting me know (and anyone interested) that the Scifi Channel is expanding their themed syndication schedule yet again. As you may or may not know, Scifi picks a some random show and runs it for most of the morning and afternoon, Mon-Fri, from 8am until about 4pm. On Monday evenings they've been using a rotation that began with Stargate SG-1 seasons 1-4 after Showtime pulled the plug after five seasons and Scifi picked it up. The fifth season was stuck in limbo for a time due to syndication rights belonging to somebody else -- probably Fox.

That Monday slot from 7-10pm ran SG-1 several times through before moving on to other shows. I think Firefly was there for a while, and lately it's been Star Trek: Enterprise. Now comes news that Tuesday night is getting the same treatment with the fourth season of Stargate Atlantis running in a three hour block beginning tomorrow.

SGA returns with new episodes July 11th.

Gossip and "tabloid journalism" is pretty much impossible to avoid these days. That's all Drudge is, and it's basically the only type of story the pathetic, character obsessed media will report during this presidential campaign. Maybe it has always been that way in the modern era. It says more about the press and the people obsessing on this crap than it does the audience who is held captive to it by way of not being provided any kind of viable alternative. I'm talking about the Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo shoot today, but it could and does apply to practically any one of the media's fascinations with shiny things.