Valve is now selling posable plush Hunters for $40. Remember, it's faster to just run them over with your plush car so you can concentrate on the plush striders.

Industry and multi-console news

New media: Lego Batman screenshots, featuring Lego Harley Quinn

• Toshiba denies reports that they're dropping HD-DVD, saying instead that the company is “currently assessing its business strategies”.
• 1up has a feature called A Day in the Life of Final Fantasy's Nobuo Uematsu, an extremely long and in-depth interview that took place over the course of an entire day at Uematsu's summer cabin.
• The current plan is for all versions of Fallout 3 to release on the same day.
• Magic: The Gathering games are coming to PC, Mac and Xbox Live Arcade.
• Mass Effect won game of the year at this year's Elans Awards. I don't know, it's some Canadian thing.
• The Interactive Software Federation of Europe is urging the UK government to stick with their existing ratings method instead of going for a unified national classification system. The director general says “I would resent that idea of equating games to movies – it’s not the same experience.”
• Lego Indiana Jones will feature four player online co-op.
• Engadget has a hands-on with the Guitar Hero Carabiner LCD toy seen in Friday's newspost.
• A member of the Sonic Retro forums plans to releasing several prototypes of Sonic games onto the Internet this Saturday.
• Jack Thompson is already threatening to sue Northern Illinois University if they don't give him "documents that reveal Steven Kazmierczak’s play of violent video games, including but not limited to the use of his computer to play Counter-Strike, which he apparently, according to the New York Post, used to rehearse for his Valentine’s Day Massacre at NIU."
• Corpus Christi police claim that local graffiti artists are inspired by Marc Ecko's Getting Up and the Tony Hawk games.
• I avoid linking to analyst predictions because I think it's a waste of everyone's time, but let's dig in and find out why. Kotaku analyzes the analysts and charts how often they get things right. "The highest-ranking analysts (still with only six out of ten) were Pachter, Patel, and Osawa, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were the best at predicting overall. Both Patel and Osawa made very generalized predictions that had a greater chance of being correct."

PC and mobile news

New demo: Avernum 5

• A UK bank has stopped automatic World of Warcraft subscription payments, saying that there is a frequent use of stolen credit cards to pay them.
• Square Enix has formed a studio for the development of mobile content, because what we need are more Final Fantasy VII spin-offs on cell phones.
• The Witcher Enhanced Edition will be coming to stores this May. "The Witcher was received very warmly by both players and the media, but we are well aware that it is not a product without its faults. There was just not enough time to perfect certain elements, while we learned that some things needed to be changed from the players themselves. Now we have the opportunity to introduce changes that will allow The Witcher to provide even more enjoyment."
• International human rights organization Breakthrough has released I Can End Deportation, a free game "designed to spark dialogue and create awareness of unfair U.S. immigration policies."

Nintendo news

New Virtual Console titles: Ninja Gaiden III and Phantasy Star II

• This is supposedly gameplay footage of an early build of Samba de Amigo on the Wii.
• A physician and a child psychologist have expressed the concern that the Wii controller trains children for violence. "You are learning the muscle memory necessary to do those acts, to stab someone, to chop someone, to shoot someone. It’s one step closer to a virtual reality in which you are actually doing these things to people." If you chop a carrot you are learning the muscle memory necessary to chop a person.
• Amazon's deal of the day is Tony Hawk's Proving Ground on the Wii for $25.00.

Sony news

• Ian Bogost has an opinion piece on Sony's corporate divisions -- "the company is more feudal state than networked global multinational" -- and how that hurts their ability to provide a unified message to consumers.

Microsoft news

• This week's Live Arcade title will be N+.
• According to a job posting, Microsoft could be beginning work on constructing a new Xbox Live.
• Microsoft doesn't think recent reports about HD-DVD will have any impact on the 360. "We will wait until we hear from Toshiba before announcing any specific plans around the Xbox 360 HD DVD player."
• Paramount will now be offering movies on the UK Marketplace.
• A fix for an issue with melee in Halo 3 is coming this week.
• GamePro claims that Microsoft is going to buy out Epic, but let's keep this in the rumor column for now.