If you’re as excited about the new World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King as I am, then you may be already clinging to Web sites giving out morsels of information on the beta testing. You may have gone as far as signing up for the beta via worldofwarcraft.com and anxiously await a little surprise e-mail inviting you to the continent of Northrend… again like me.

Be wary, however. The only way to get into beta is to sign up through your account at the official Web site and then receive an e-mail with a beta key and directions. Don’t be fooled by other sites and videos that would lead you to beleive they have a secret way to access the beta. Every one of these tricky sites will ask for your World of Warcraft log-in information and maybe your security question’s answer.

The fact is they are simply fishing the information out of gullible WoW patrons in order to comprimise your account’s riches somewhere in the future.

Be patient, if you’re not accepted into beta, which is generally more of a job than a gaming experience, you’ll soon be seeing new lands. Blizzard hasn’t commented on an actual release date, but since the game is in beta phase, I’d expect it to be out by the end of the year.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, will be starting Monday, July 14. E3 is among the largest of video game expos that happen here in the United States and is traditionally the launch pad for new game titles to be revealed and other exciting announcements.

Usually all the big boys come to play at E3 including Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, along with countless software developers and publishers.

This year, Gametrailers.com has teamed up with E3 to bring tons of the information from the show floor via video to consumers not invited to the show. Sadly, since E3 2006, the show has slimmed down considerably to better serve the gaming media.

Things I’m looking forward to hearing about this year are:

• Little Big Planet (PS3)
• Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)
• Gears of War 2 (XBox 360)
• New Wario Game (Wii)
• Secret Nintendo game (Wii)
• Anything new on the MMO front especially WarHammer Online
• Decisions from Microsoft about a Blu-ray addon to the 360

Of course, anything exciting I just can’t hold back, I’ll try to post here. With the PS3 maturing and the 360 already in it’s prime, this looks like it might be a very good year for gamers.

Blizzard made some pretty huge announcements at this year’s World Wide Invitational in Paris. The biggest of which was Diablo III, which gamers have been waiting for a very long time to hear any news of a sequel. Videos can be found here.

More importantly to myself is all the new updates to World of Warcraft and even more news on the new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. If you’re a WoW head like I am, there’s so much content to take in, it’s almost overwhelming. Best place I’ve found to view everything nicely packaged is MMO-Champion.com.

Starcraft II is still in development. Sadly there were no release dates announced, but Blizzard says to expect Wrath of the Lich King by the end of 2008.

With the amazing push against video games being present in the open market, it’s hard to focus on how other forms of media are doing when mature content spreads across all spectrums.

I found this story via Wired.com’s Game | Life blog in which the author focused on how much mature content was being kept from younger hands over the past years. When I began reading the story, I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw the percentiles of other forms of media.

The FTC, Federal Trade Commission, which takes the control of explicit material through commercial media and broadcast media very seriously, performed a 2008 study in which 13 to 16 year olds were asked to try to purchase R-rated movie tickets, R-rated and Unrated DVDs, Parental Advisory Label (PAL) music CDs, and M-rated video games. The FTC has performed 4 other similar studies in 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2006.

In 2008, the percentage of young teens that were able to purchase M-rated video games was 20%. In my opinion, that’s still too high (check out the original article to see which retail chains are to blame).

However, the next lowest percentile of susseccful purchases by minors is nearly double that of video game’s failure. Movie theater chains allowed 35% of the study’s minors to purchase R-rated movie tickets. However, according to the graph, the theaters have been the most successful over the years keeping mature content from minors, but they don’t seem to be making much headway for improvment.

Retail chains show apauling statistics, with 47% minors able to purchase R-rated DVDs, 51% able to purchase Unrated DVDs, and a staggering 54% able to purchase music CDs with Parental Advisory Labels on the front cover.

Thankfully, these percentages are coming down from the years of previous studies. And maybe because I am a gamer I have a cetain talent for hearing or reading the onslaught of video game bashing brought forth from the likes of Jack Thompson, FOX News, public organizations, city councils and even federal and state governements.

It has been years since I’ve heard a whisper about other violent/sexual forms of media and how to keep them out of the hands of minors. How can those with a voice continually lynch the most successful ratings system that is being enforced better than all the others?

My speculations? Some are simply trying to jumpstart a political campaign (Hilary Clinton, Jack Thompson, etc.) on a topic they know next to nothing about, OR they truly are egomanics crazy enough to label a whole demographic as “neo-nazis” deserving to spend life on deathrow.

I have to get this off my chest. There’s this game scheduled for a Fall 2008 release that has me vexed by some sort of spell.

LittleBigPlanet for the PlayStation 3 is an incredibly unique game promising some amazing gameplay and experiences.

Think Super Mario Bros. having a freak genetic accident with MySpace, creating a social network specifically for gamers, in which everyone is a sock-puppet jumping, running and creating custom content in a photo-realistic, building block world.

That’s just all kinds of cool.

In single-player mode, the object of the game is to collect, collect, collect! Any piece of material, object or even music found in the game’s default levels are automatically added to your inventory in custom edit mode. Players can then join the game’s online features and share custom levels and objects via a world-wide social network.

For some reason, this game just makes sense. It’s just supposed to be. LittleBigPlanet releases fall this year.

Check out some amazing gameplay videos and trailers here: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/25200.html

I apologize in advance for the third blog post on the subject of video games in a row, but I saw this on digg this morning and was very impressed. A study was launched to go out into the real world and find out how violent video games actually effect children and teenagers. Authors Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olsen lead the study and published their findings in the book Grand Theft Childhood.

G4TV’s Adam Sessler interviews the two authors on his show X-Play, a show about video game news and reviews. That video can be found here.

In the interview, Kutner and Olsen explain their findings were worlds apart from popularly cited research programs that claim violent video games make a violent person. They even included non-gamers and children who play non-violent video games into the study. Their findings are very interesting.

In the end I think the only answer left to the big debate is there are good people and there are psychopathically deranged, homocidally preoccupied, should-be-locked-up bad people.