Industry and multi-console news:

• Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, Super Columbine Massacre RPG has been pulled from the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition. You can be guerilla as long as it doesn't offend anyone. It's the first entry of any sort, film or game, that Slamdance has pulled in its 13 year history.
• Tory MP Boris Johnson has written an opinion piece for the Telegraph blaming video games for falling literacy rates. Without a hint of irony, he actually calls them "blasted gizmos," it's adorable.
• Meanwhile, the UK creative industries minister says there needs to be a video game academy.
• Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity reached an all-time high of just over one million dollars this year.
• Gamasutra takes a look at gaming addiction, if there is such a thing, and how the media portrays it.
• Cable TV channel Showtime is launching a new company called On Broadband that will offer games on demand to download or play online.
• The briefly-named GamePro Expo is now the more awkward E for All Expo. The show will be open to the public, with a $100 ticket paying for all three days of access.
• A new component cable connects all three next-gen systems to the same component input.
• As a follow-up to their recent feature studying the decline of the PS3 grey market, Kotaku compares PS3 and Wii Ebay prices since launch.
• A new study finds that playing DDR burned more calories than even walking on a treadmill for a test group of 25 children.
• 1up talks to Treasure about developing for the 360 and what's coming to the Virtual Console.
• 2K Games has announced the much anticipated Bioshock will be released in June.
• Rumors are circulating that EA has cancelled LOTR: The White Council.

PC news:

• CellFactor, the game you may remember being used to demonstrate the Ageia Physx card, will be released this spring. The game will also be on show at CES next week.
• The sold-out Collector's Edition of the Burning Crusade World of Warcraft expansion is going for three times retail price on Ebay.
• The open beta for Vanguard Saga of Heroes has begun.
• Mia Farrow will be making an appearance in Second Life to talk about Darfur. Too many Dars have been killed just for their beautiful pelts.

Nintendo news:

• UK tabloids are reporting that a 7 year old boy was "killed by his Christmas Game Boy." What actually happened was he somehow got electrocuted while unplugging his Game Boy charger in a hotel room in Thailand, most likely due to the difference in current in foreign countries. Nintendo has issued a statement.
• IGN has an interview with the lead designer for SSX Blur.
• Matt Casamassina says a version of Halo was made for the DS, but cancelled. And he played it.
• There's a new Dragon Quest Swords trailer for your perusal.
• Someone has uploaded the history of the NES G4 special to YouTube.

Sony news:

• Gripshift and Jumping Flash! are now available in the Playstation store.
• Sony has made it clear that since the Sixaxis doesn't support it, racing wheels on the PS3 won't have force feedback either.
• Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi has once again made it to Motor Trend's top 50 power list.
• A Wedbush Morgan analyst claims Bully didn't sell well enough to get a sequel.
• Harmonix says that they proposed a sequel to Frequency and Amplitude on the PSP, but Sony declined their request.
• It's a bad day for PSP music games in general, as LucasArts has dumped Traxion. Kuju may find a different publisher elsewhere, but for now the game's fate is up in the air.

Microsoft news:

• The ESRB has added a rating for Final Doom to their database for the 360, suggesting it may come to Live Arcade.
• A "leaked" picture of a 360 with an HDMI port is claimed to be an upcoming 360 hardware revision codenamed Zephyr. It's also said to have a cooler, quieter CPU (we've already known about that part for a while) and a 120 GB hard drive.
• Team Xbox has the box art for the 360 version of Guitar Hero II, which claims "additional songs and downloadable content."
• GameTrailers has a new preview video for Blue Dragon.
• Ars Technica has a look at Ana, the Xbox 360 scaling chip and what it provides over the PS3. Watch for the point when one of the Microsoft guys indirectly calls HD-DVD "something that may be the next Betamax." He meant well, he just.. didn't say it well.