The attached video will show an easy, zero-risk method for utilizing poor pathfinding AI to easily dispatch all three giant club-weilding Barbarians near the Valley of Drakes / Londo Ruins entrance to Blighttown.

All you need to do is get their attention, then run back to the ladder that goes down into Blighttown and climb down a rung or two. The Barbarians will chase you, then fall to their deaths when they get to the wooden walkway. I was never able to get more than one of them to follow me at a time, so if you want to kill all three of them using this method...

A few weeks ago, I started reading about some new ad campaign that Sony was planning called "Long Live Play". I was kind of disappointed to hear that Sony would be taking a new approach to its advertising, as I actually really enjoyed some of the early Kevin Butler ads. Today, I saw the first advertisement in this new campaign, and it blew me away in terms of creativity and execution!

The full ad is shown below:

While a "love letter" to the gamer in the form of a TV commercial doesn't make up for losing tens of millions of people's Credit Card information, reminding people of why they love to game is a great first step towards bringing back our business. The advertisement above features many of the most beloved characters in the PlayStation 3 library giving heartfelt thanks to the efforts of one valiant gamer for bringing their stories to life and helping them through their greatest perils.

Despite it's insane difficulty, the PS3-exclusive RPG Demon's Souls became one of my favorite games on the console. Unfortunately, after my PS3 died on me and I had to have it replaced by Sony, I lost my save file for this game and never completed it. I was damned close too! I had cleared at least the first two levels of each world, and had even killed the Dragon God at the bottom of Stonefeng. I was pissed when I found out that save file had not transferred onto my replacement system.

With the sequel, Dark Souls, due out in less than a month, I figured I'd go back to Demon's Souls and try to finish it before I pick up the sequel - not going to be an easy task...

Hopefully, I'll have the game beat in time for the "sequel" to arrive. Although, as far as I can tell, Dark Souls is considered a "spiritual successor" to Demon's Souls, rather than a strict sequel (similar to the relationship between Shadow of the Colossus and Ico).

My excitement for Dark Souls has even inspired me to break my year-long boycott of game pre-orders and "special edition" purchases.

The first Dead Space really impressed me. A lot. I think it was released in the same year as Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4. And Dead Space ended up being my favorite game of that year. Of course, part of that was because I was actually able to finish Dead Space by the end of the year, and Grand Theft Auto took longer. In hindsight, GTA IV was probably better. The first Dead Space game perfectly captured the feel of the classic science fiction horror film Alien, but with a bit more action.

The attention to detail was astounding, and the Ishimura just felt so functional! Like a real spaceship. Other than the artificial gravity, the Ishimura seemed like something you might see on a Science Channel special about hypothetical space mining craft The layout and organization of the ship just made sense, and the use of holographic displays as the game’s HUD and interface was brilliant design. And the space setting made the clunkiness of the character's movements actually work thematically - even though he still performed better than the characters from Resident Evil 4 and 5 anyway!

The concept of dismembering enemies to kill them was novel and added a unique dynamic to the otherwise stale shooter formula. On top of that, every one of the improvised engineering tools that were offered as weapons kicked ass (only, ironically, the military pulse rifle felt weak). And the boot stomp! Oh, the boot stomp!

Dead Space hit a gaming sweet spot for me that would be very difficult to improve upon in a sequel. Everything about it just felt so right – except that asteroid shooter segment – that part blew big time.

So after they get their PlayStation Network servers hacked by vengeful hackers and expose 100 million user accounts, passwords, and credit card numbers to those hackers, they offered a "Welcome Back" package with a free 30-day subscription to PlayStation Plus, some free downloadable games, and a few other stuff. But that was the least they could do after making all their customers vulnerable to identity theft. They don't deserve credit or praise for that.

I activated my free subscription to PlayStation Plus last week because I knew the offer was expiring soon. I waited to the last minute because there's really nothing on PlayStation Plus that I'm remotely interested in. My plan was to wait till the last minute to activate it so that I could still at least back up all my save files to the Cloud in case my newly refurbished PS3 decided to croak on me again.

I'm glad I did it when I did, because I noticed that the "Welcome Back" stuff was gone from the PSN when I logged in yesterday. So I guess that means the offer has ended.

But Sony didn't bother to give users any notification or warning that the program was going to expire that I was aware of. No email notification. No messages when logging into the Playstation Store. I don't even think the "Welcome Back" pages showed the expiration date (did they?). Maybe there was a notification in the little news ticker on the top right, but that thing is so small, I never notice it.

Way to go Sony.