Blog Posts by Chris Morris

Mortal Kombat - Warner Bros. The Easter Bunny apparently stuffed a few baskets with video games this year. The late holiday and a strong slate of titles overcame gloomy headlines of data theft to boost April video game sales by 26 percent, according to the NPD Group.

Hardware sales were also impressive, climbing 12 percent overall, though Microsoft and Sony had a lot more to celebrate than Nintendo did.

The Xbox 360 sold 297,000 units last month, a 60 percent increase over last April and beating out both the Wii and PS3. Despite the cyber attacks that resulted in the theft of personal information from over 100 million accounts, Sony saw its hardware sales jump 13 percent.

While Nintendo didn't issue a statement and

Playstation 3 - Sony As the PlayStation Network outage inches closer to the one-month mark, the extended downtime is testing more than just the patience of some players.

It's testing their loyalty.

Some retailers in the U.K. report that they have seen a substantial increase in trade-ins of PlayStation 3 consoles, with gamers either pocketing the cash or using it to buy an Xbox 360, reports Edge.

Here in the U.S., things are a little murkier. GameStop is slated to release its quarterly earnings next week, putting it in an SEC "quiet period" where it does not comment on activities that can affect its financial numbers -- including trade-in trends. The company could address the matter during a conference call

Lady Gaga - Getty Images Not content being the queen of social media, Lady Gaga is now taking her act to social gaming.

The iconic pop star has teamed with social games maker Zynga to create GagaVille, a newly created FarmVille farm which will give her little
monsters the chance to hear unreleased songs from her forthcoming album, "Born This Way," before anyone else.

Here's how it will work: Starting next week, FarmVille
players will be able to visit the neighboring in-game farm GagaVille, an area
the company describes as being full of "colorful crystals, magical
unicorns, sheep on motorcycles, and if we can cram it in, some leather and
glitter." By completing quests and unlocking Clear Channel's iHeartRadio

Scrabble - Hasbro Scrabble, one of the last bastions of grammatical purism in
a world overrun by cell phone text abbreviations, is capitulating to the times.

The board game plans to add 3,000 new words to its official dictionary, including several slang terms like "thang" (9 points) and "grrl" (5 points) as well as pop culture touchstones, like Facebook and MySpace.

Turning the most heads is the inclusion of "innit," a condensation of "isn't it" that will earn you 5 points - and the undying hatred of any English majors who are playing along.

In addition, two new "Q" words have been added that don't require a "u". "Qin" (a Chinese zither, with strings stretched across a flat box) will earn you 12 points,

Black Ops

Every day, the average Facebook user spends 55 minutes clicking through the popular social networking site. That's an impressive time
sink -- but players of Call of Duty: Black Ops have them beat.

Activision says since the First Strike downloadable content pack was released on February 1, players have averaged 58 minutes per day playing online. Given that the game itself is now over six months old, that's a
seriously dedicated fan base.

In fact, since the game's release, Black Ops players have logged over 1.2 billion hours of online play. To put things in perspective, that's just shy of 137,000 man years.

And the publisher is looking to hook that fan base in even further. During an

Pac-Ban Don't look for a Pac-Man machine in Marshfield, Mass. And forget finding a place to play Golden Tee as well.

Located 25 miles southeast of Boston, the small city of 4,297 is the only town in America where arcade games are illegal. And it likes it that way.

Twenty-nine years after citizens of the town voted to ban the placement of video game machines in public places, Marshfield voters were asked if it was time to get rid of the law. The vote, held during a town hall meeting, was 655-554 against making any changes.

Arcades, of course, are relatively hard to find anywhere these days, but that's more due to the popularity of home systems than because of legal restrictions. So what, exactly,

The video game industry is littered with terrible gadgets. But while the gaudiest gear -- Nintendo's ROB the Robot and PowerGlove, or the original Xbox's massive Steel Battalion setup -- score headlines, it's the smaller bits and baubles that can really make you crazy.

Intended to make your gaming experience smoother, easier, smarter, or prettier, the worst extras often wind up spending more time in a drawer than your hands. Here are a few pieces of gaming hardware you should probably play without:

HDMI Cables Expensive HDMI Cables

It's a common tale: You tear open the box for your brand new home console, start setting it up, but are miffed to find that the system didn't come with the correct cable to

Washington D.C. is about to be invaded by a who's who of video game icons.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has unveiled the 80 fan-selected titles that will be on display at an upcoming exhibition on the art of video games -- and a lot of familiar names appear on the list.

Woo-hoo! Mario. Master Chief. Donkey Kong. Lara Croft. They'll all be part of the display, which opens next March and runs through September.

The Smithsonian issued a call for votes in February. Two months later, 119,000 people in 125 countries had cast 3.7 million votes. 240 titles were nominated, spread across 20 different gaming systems and a variety of genres. The titles were broken into five categories by time period,