Don’t tell my son, but Santa is bringing us a Wii for Christmas.

And by ‘Santa’, I mean my enterprising husband - who hunted one down over Black Friday and stuffed it in the back of our closet. This is the display of some of the greatest restraint ever shown by a techno-crazy man.

One of my concerns about getting a Wii was the barrage of ‘Ping! Splat! Wowza!’ that would echo through our house at all hours as we engaged in Mario-Sonic Olympics.

Not to worry.

As it turns out, Wii is Bluetooth-enabled. An excuse, if ever one was needed, to buy several MoGo Headsets when they roll into production. This will create a truly personal and wireless playing experience.

On the flip side, having those cool Wii-remotes (’Wiimotes’) be Bluetooth-based means that several enterprising hackers have found ways to turn them into mice for your computer.

Because the remotes aren’t designed for that use (unlike the MoGo x54 series) , the results of these experiments have been very interesting.

Perhaps my favorite is the guys who turned their Wii motes into Lightsabers on their Macs.

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Record Breaking

On its first day of release, Halo3 broke records with US$170 million in sales. Now the numbers are in - and Halo3 broke more records in its first week of sales, with over US$300 million. The game, which is available exclusively for the XBox 360, is now officially the fastest-selling video game in history.

According to this morning’s press release from Microsoft, Bil Gates is calling the game a “cultural phenomenon.”

“…The launch of ‘Halo 3′ is an important milestone for XBox 360 and for video games as entertainment and as an art form,” said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. “‘Halo 3′ embodies our vision for the future of entertainment, where some of the world’s greatest creative minds will deliver a new generation of interactive storytelling.”

The HALO World 

For those of you unsure what all the hype is about. the “Halo” games are a militaristic sci-fi based scenario. Played first-person, the main heroes are “Master Chief” (human super-soldier with advanced armor) and Cortana (an AI companion). It is humans vs. aliens in several scenarios played out on the space station “Halo”. You can find the specific storyline and details of Halo3 here.

Single-Platform 

There had been some rumors that the game would be available for Nintendo, but those plans have been abandoned. The exclusive partnering with XBox has driven up sales of that gaming platform exponentially.

Meanwhile, proponents of the other gaming platforms - especially  Nintendo, but also Wii, have voiced their anger over the exclusivity deal with XBox. Like Apple’s recent corporate marriage to AT&T in regards to the iPhone, however, the customers now find themselves on the losing side of a war with their own product providers.

Security Issues 

Halo3 is  has an integrated online game version for XBox LIVE subscribers that allows players to join up, do battle, and communicate in the virtual overworld of HALO.  This has been somewhat controversial because ‘LIVE’ gaming gives access to players to communicate with each other without the kind of parental safety controls available on for Internet.

Additionally, there have some security breaches highlighted this past summer with the Windows Live ID service that is used for identity with XBox . The breaches allowed many scammers to create false identities - accounts that have not, as yet, been completely flushed out.

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