Activision will reportedly release a censored version of Modern Warfare 2 in Japan that punishes you for shooting civilians. In Western versions, players can fire indiscriminately into crowds of people during the game's controversial "No Russian" level. In the Japanese version, however, players will automatically fail the mission if they shoot noncombatants thronging the level's realistic rendition of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport.

Nintendo, as you know, wants to make third-party flash cartridges anathema to its DS game handhelds. Some gamers want the right to use these cards, they say, to develop legal "homebrew" games. In reality, a majority of these flash cartridge owners design nothing whatsoever, and instead traffic in illegal software, downloading copies of DS games from torrent sites and using latchkey ploys to bypass Nintendo's inbuilt anti-piracy strictures.

Wal-Mart, it seems, is out for buckets of blood this holiday, lopping serious coin off a slew of popular video games, with intent to siphon video gamers away from retailers like GameStop, Best Buy, and Toys R Us.

In the "I'll do anything for attention" category this morning, Spike TV Video Game Awards host Geoff Keighley can reportedly be heard pimping for Microsoft's upcoming Halo: Reach in a recent Microsoft-hosted podcast, claiming it'll be "the biggest game of next year by far." Yep, bigger than Mass Effect 2, God of War III, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, and whatever Microsoft and Sony have up their sleeves when they launch their respective motion-control gizmos.

I'd hate to think Emotiv's Epoc neuro-technology interface, which mounted up looks a bit like a head crab pretending to be a bunch of hair berets, is just another loopy venture capital stab premised on immature science, but then I'm pretty cynical about this stuff. I've tried one too many abysmal stabs in the dark over the years, each of them claiming to give you mental control of something in virtual space by reading electrical (brain, electromagnetic body field, etc.) activity. None, of course, delivered even a fraction of their promise.

Research firm IDC says Apple's App Store could stock in excess of a quarter million iPhone and iPod Touch applications, tripling current levels by the end of 2010. That's some number. Contrast with an estimated 10,000 Windows 7-compatible apps, over 700 (released as well as announced) Xbox 360 games, nearly 600 PS3 games, over 1,000 Wii games, over 600 DS games (from September 2008), and over 700 PSP games.

I couldn't care less about game box art, but since it's Final Fantasy XIII, and that's the game I'm looking forward to most in 2010, I'll shill for Square Enix and post the US box covers.

Listen up Moms and Dads, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is giving away a handy new iPhone tool that'll help you quick-check what's what when it comes to game content. Not that the little black-and-white rectangles voluntarily stamped on game jackets are tricky to understand at a glance, but this app's more than just a reference tool for the industry-representin' ESRB's alpha-numeric rating schema: It'll let you quick-check the ratings summary of any game you're thinking of buying, too.

To paraphrase Stan Lee, with great Cyber Monday online and retail game deals comes great responsibility not to rubber stamp them. That said, the pressure's on, especially after a report from the National Retail Federation suggested US consumers spent significantly less at the outset of the holiday season this weekend than over the same period last year.

Can't get enough Xbox LIVE out of your Xbox 360? Apple iPhone owner? Two bucks to spare? You might care to give 360 Live a look. It's a smallish 1.6MB app available through Apple's iPhone store designed to let you reach out and touch your Xbox LIVE account from just about anywhere, as well as several of the service's tracking and messaging features.