If you find the full version of Madden (see review here) to be too expensive, complicated, or both but you still long for the thrill and prestige of legally-licensed NFL players and teams, then you’ll be happy to know that Madden NFL Arcade will be here sometime in December.

Now might be the time to start stocking up on video games for the cold winter months ahead. Amazon is running a “buy two get one free” video game deal from now until this Saturday, October 17, with an eligible selection of almost 500 titles.

BFG is well-known for their video cards and other gaming peripherals, but did you know they make systems too? It’s true. BFG announced their first desktop system earlier this year, and now they are jumping into the performance notebook arena with the new Deimos system.

Philadelphites (Philadelphanaes? Philadelphonistas? Philadelphonzos?) – Philadelphians! You have your weekend all mapped out for you, assuming you’re a geek.

Portable gaming emulators: Can there be too many on the market? I submit, “No.” The more the merrier, as they say. Here’s a new arrival from Chinavasion that looks like it might have a decent D-pad and well-placed buttons. The “Gemei x760+” is priced at $81 and comes with built-in support for Game Boy Advance, Neo Geo, and CAPCOM arcade systems with other systems available for download.

Announced back in May, The Biggest Loser is now officially available for the Nintendo Wii and DSi platforms for $40 and $30, respectively, bringing the grand total of fitness games on the market up to seven billion and one.

Developed by THQ, the game mimics the experience of being on The Biggest Loser Ranch just like the TV contestants, except that you get to live in your own house and you can keep eating delicious donuts with reckless abandon — it’ll be our little secret.

Be still my beating heart. The UberNES Nintendo Screen Saver displays a grid of multiple working NES games when your computer is idle. Leave it be, and you’ll see all the various demos running at once. Hit the spacebar and you can actually start playing the games.

Tears of joy, my friends. Tears of joy.

Monsters under your bed? Yeah, me too. Scary, isn’t it? I hate going to sleep at night! You and I both need one of these six-foot Link statues for protection. Unfortunately, there’s only one for sale on eBay right now. You can have it, I guess. I’ll wait for the next one.

As of yesterday, Wii Fit Plus is available for purchase wherever Wii games are sold. The standalone version of the game retails for $20 while the game and balance board (required) together go for $100. If you bought the first version of Wii Fit with the balance board, you only need to purchase the standalone version of Wii Fit Plus.

And here we see one of the most useful implementations of an astromech droid to date. Modder Brian De Vitis gutted a novelty R2D2 beverage cooler and somehow managed to stuff eight old-school consoles inside. And – AND! – there’s a built-in projector. Very nice.

Sandbox games are nothing new, but in general, most players try to play the game in the way the designers intended: be good, complete quests, and reach the eventual end of the game in an orderly fashion. Sometimes though, you just have that urge to be bad.

Gamer and writer Alexander Gambotto-Burke has written about his descent into madness, and how purely visceral and difficult it is to play a psychopath. He talks about wandering the streets of Megaton using a sledgehammer like a slaughterhouse worker, killing the residents in their sleep. The interesting part is that he starts to really feel bad about it.

The year was 2002. Two friends and I had just finished moving into a swanky three-bedroom affair a block away from Lake Calhoun in the trendy Uptown area of Minneapolis. Upon waking up after a blowout house warming party with what seemed like 500 of our closest friends, I found my SNES, Genesis, and Dreamcast covered in beer and orange juice. I haven’t felt complete since that very moment. If you could punch someone’s soul, that’s how it feels.

Now it appears that Sony’s “currently in discussions to bring a number of Dreamcast titles exclusively to PSN,” according to MCV.

Last week we brought you news of Direct2Drive’s 5th birthday sale-stravaganza wherein various direct-download action-themed games were going for $5 each.

The five-week sale is in its third week, and today kicks off a bunch of RPG and MMO titles for just five buckaroos apiece.

You guys sitting down? Bad news from The Internet!

Rare, the company behind GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64, basically said that the game will probably never be available for download on the Wii or Xbox 360.

After finally adding some drummy goodness with Guitar Hero World Tour and then issuing the video game equivalent of a greatest hits album, the newest installment of Activision’s wildly popular Guitar Hero series has hit the market.

Many may look at Guitar Hero 5 the same way people look at popular sports games like EA’s Madden series: the core game hasn’t changed that much at all but there are some new features here and there, plus 85 new songs to play and a slightly redesigned guitar controller.

Diehard fans of the series will likely go out and buy Guitar Hero 5 without much convincing, while people who are slowly (or quickly) growing weary of the near-endless crop of music games aren’t likely to find much here to change their minds. So let’s focus on those of us (myself included) in the middle – people who like music games enough to keep playing them but need some good reasons to keep shelling out $60 to $100 every other month (or so it seems).