Twisted Metal co-director David Jaffe manages to make fans of the series extremely happy and me feel incredibly old in one fell swoop.

Thanks for the free copy of PlayStation 2 classic Twisted Metal Black, Dave. If anyone needs me I'll be down at Hardees with the rest of the elderly, stuffing horrible food into a digestive system to desiccated to care anymore.

A Twisted Metal Message from David Jaffe [PlayStation Blog]

Allegedly enraged over her five-year-old son's playing of a video game he received as a Christmas gift, Jutrina Tillman of Phoenix, Arizona, dragged the young boy into his bedroom and began to strangle him before threatening to kill him and his 13-year-old sister with a butcher knife.

Around 10PM on Christmas night Phoenix police received a 911 call from Tillman's hysterical daughter, claiming the woman was attempting to kill her and her younger brother over a video game.

Tillman, who had reportedly been drinking throughout the day, flew into a rage over her five-year-old son's playing of a new game he received as a holiday gift earlier that day. According to the daughter, the mother grabbed her son by the arm and dragged him into his bedroom. Hearing screaming, the daughter entered the room to find her mother strangling her little brother.

Tillman stopped attacking the boy, leaving the room only to return with a six to eight inch butcher knife, pointing it at the girl's chest and brandishing it towards the boy, threatening to kill them both. When the daughter broke free and ran outside dialing 911, the mother grabbed the boy and bore him back inside the house, choking him with the crook of her arm.

Fortunately police arrived before either child was seriously hurt. Upon their arrival Tillman attempted to flee to a neighbor's house but was taken into custody. The children are safe with relatives today, while Tillman herself is police custody, facing two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

So, how was your Christmas?

Police: Video game rage ends with mom attacking kids [KHPO.com]

Don't forget to come to the last Kotaku Game Club of 2011! We'll be wrapping up our discussion on Skyward Sword tomorrow at 4pm Eastern.

What happens when a crazy Smuggler is joined by, a Jedi Consular, a Trooper, and a Sith Warrior in week two of Kotaku's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO Log? Opinions change, ideas form, and they all learn a little something about friendship (and possibly crafting).

I spent my second week in The Old Republic branching out a bit. With the official launch of the game on December 20, more players flooded the already flooded servers, forcing me to slip into a server a little more comfortable to see things from the Sith side. Meanwhile, on my Republic server, I found myself growing bored with the duck-and-cover tactics of my level 23 Gunslinger character and decided to rack up 26 levels or so as a Jedi Consular / Shadow, or as I like to call him, my Jedi Ninja. He's got stealth, backstabbing, charm and grace. What he lacks in good looks I made up for with my female Trooper, voice by the always amazing Jennifer Hale.

The end result of a week's worth of multiple personality disorder? I find my opinion on some of the aspects of the game I hated last week softening somewhat, while features I found entertaining are losing their novelty.

Let's see what's changed, shall we?

PVP Combat

One of the few places my opinion did not change over the past week was player-versus-player combat. It's still a mess, regularly pitting players with little or no experience fighting against live targets against level 50 guilds dedicated to the pursuit of PVP domination. If BioWare wants to inject console game sensibilities into the MMO space, they'd best start with a little matchmaking. I'd gladly wait longer in a queue if it meant not having to face off against players that eat, sleep, and piss killing me as efficiently as possible.

Space Combat

I know I whined endlessly about the game's on-rails space combat missions last week, but they're beginning to grow on me. It helps if I pretend I'm playing StarFox, another on-rails space shooter in which annoying AI character spout out useless instructions while you try to keep from crashing into asteroids. With the right mindset in place I went from avoiding space combat altogether to making the quick-and-dirty missions a part of my daily play schedule.

There is definitely room for improvement here, however. What I'd really love to see is leaderboards for the top pilots in the game, calculating score versus damage taken during these high risk, high reward missions. If you're going to make me repeat the same handful of missions over and over again, at least give me the chance to show off the skill honed through dozens of deep space escort and combat quests.

Ground Combat

One of the highlights from my first week of playing, the entertainment value of ground combat in The Old Republic plummets significantly in the mid-20s. In other MMO games it's these middle levels in which I hit my stride, my role in a group becoming clearer, my tactics honed to a razor's edge. That's not the case in The Old Republic.

Take my Jedi Shadow, Accel. He's got two full hotbars filled with colorful icons, and additional hotbar on the right side of the screen. I've got a basic grasp of the tactics I should be using. I know that stunning into a backstab is a great maneuver, and saving the power that resets the recharge for that stun is a great way to deal extra damage to a boss character, but most of the time I feel slightly lost looking at all of these colored icons.

So my plan next week is to hone these skills, optimize my bars, and work my way towards level 50 with a tighter understanding of what I am supposed to be doing. Hopefully that'll happen.

Travel

I hit level 25 and got my own personal mount. Ain't she a beaut? Now those wide-open space feel like slightly less wide-open spaces, though I still get the feel that a lot of the surface area of the planets I am exploring is just there to make the worlds seem completely huge, not actually adding anything to the overall plot or gameplay. This is especially true of Tatooine. I get it, it's one grand desert. I've got sand everywhere.

Companions and Crafting

I still adore both the class-specific companions and the unique companion-driven crafting system. Nothing to report here other than I am one hell of an Artificer, and I owe it all to my lizard man friend.

Group Missions

Get to know your party members. This is the key to surviving the long, frustrating pauses in the BioWare dialog system during group missions and Flashpoints. If you're just sitting there quietly waiting for the story to progress then yes, it will be a horrible experience. If you're playfully teasing the light or dark-siders in your group, snarkily commenting on the NPCs' reactions, or cooperatively dreaming up your own dialog tree choices, the wait doesn't hurt quite as much as it did.

And if you end up with a group filled with quiet types? Take a nap. They'll love that.

As the Jedi Turns...

This week's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO log is a prime example of why we do four weekly sessions and then a review. My opinions have greatly changed between one period of seven days and the next. Who knows what next week will bring?

Well I do. More levels, more crafting, and more hot Jedi on Sith action. Be there!

This spring in Japan the swords, axes, and spears of Fire Emblem spring forth from the 3DS screen to pierce your eyeballs with varying degrees of severity depending on which sort of weapon you're holding at the time. Check out the live stream of the game from the Nintendo Direct presser.

One of the first 3DS games to support downloadable content looks like it's coming with a pleasing combination of 2D travel and 3D battles packed right in. Will it be formulaic? Dude, Fire Emblem is the very definition of formulaic. It wouldn't be Fire Emblem otherwise.

It's the same old game with a few new lines of code and sharp visuals. Sometimes that's all you really need.

"I want to clear my name. I want to get these people to stop bothering me."

That was the main message from Ocean Marketing's Paul Christoforo, a former representative for N-Control's Avenger controller attachment. He gained immediate infamy among the Internet gaming community after a hostile customer service email exchange went viral after landing on popular gaming webcomic Penny Arcade.

In a matter of hours, Christoforo went from being just another customer service agent to a focus of ire for thousands of gamers. Christoforo was featured in mocking images and videos, and the Avenger product he was representing was hit with widespread derision and negative Amazon reviews, forcing the company to publicly drop Christoforo as its marketing representative.

A chastened Christoforo is now looking for forgiveness from the Internet community he unwittingly antagonized, saying in an interview with MSNBC.com's In-Game he was "caught on a bad day" and that he hopes they will "let sleeping dogs lie."

"They've pretty much ruined me in the past 24 hours," Christoforo said. "It was humbling a little bit, but life goes on. I'm not going to die."

That doesn't mean Christoforo isn't still feeling the effects from becoming a household name in certain corners of the Internet - effects he says he was actively dealing with for 17 hours straight yesterday. While Christoforo said blocking his Google Voice number stopped an early flood of harassing phone calls, he's received over 7,000 e-mails in the past 24 hours, some containing threats against him and his wife and two-month-old son.

"It's caused me more annoyance than anything else, but there are some threats and a lot of disrespect," he said. "My son's two months old ... that's uncalled for, you don't bring him into this situation."

Christoforo said his wife's Facebook page has been hammered by friend requests from people trying to get at him, and the shared stress of the entire ordeal has led to at least one major argument between the couple.

Yet despite all the drama, Christoforo said he hasn't lost any of his other accounts, aside from Avenger. "It hasn't affected my business yet," he said. "Clients have brought it up, but they've mainly laughed about it. I haven't lost any clients."

"If I had known, I would have treated the situation a little better."
Referring to the email thread that started the whole mess, Christoforo said that he didn't know who he was talking to in his initial, flippant response to Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik.

"I didn't know who that guy at Penny Arcade was," he admitted. "If I had known, I would have treated the situation a little better. PAX is a great show. What he does is what I've been idlolizing since I was a kid. It's admirable he's put that together. He has a lot of connections, ones I want too."

Yet while admitting he handled things badly, Christoforo said he also felt the situation could have been different if Krahulik approached the situation differently.

"He called me a bully, but he was being a bully ... especially when he emailed me out of the blue, saying 'That's f***ing s***ty, you're banned from PAX,' I was like 'Who the f*** are you? That's how you introduce yourself? ... I dont want to call him out, but he could have gone about that a totally different way, he could have said, 'Hey, I run the show, that email was a little unprofessional, if you don't do something to apologize I don't want you at my show.' But he just came at me and said, indirectly, 'Hey, f*** you, you're banned from PAX.' Is that what you'd call professional? I wouldn't."

Christoforo also said his response was driven in part by what he saw as the disrespectful tone of the messages that came before it. "Not that I don't have respect for anybody, but if someone's badmouthing me or being a little punk or being a jerk, they don't deserve respect," he said. "You can't expect to go up and say 'Hey you piece of s***,' and expect respect. Send an email, introduce yourself. ... I trust everybody until they give me a reason not to respect them. I'm not a tough guy, not a bully, but at same time not going to take s*** if it's uncalled for.

Regarding the litany of names Christoforo's e-mail called up as potential supporters - a list that included everyone from Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski to the mayor of Boston - he said the tactic was meant to "impress, not to threaten" and didn't come through correctly because "you can't see tone of voice in email."

"I don't know the mayor of Boston," he admitted. "That was taken totally out of context, I was just joking around. I am from Boston, though, and I know a lot of people people who own clubs. I know some influential people, like the guy who runs the door at the convention center.

"Maybe it was because it was email, maybe on the phone it would have been different story ... it would have nipped everything in the bud."

Looking back, Christoforo is still a little shocked that what he thought would remain a private email conversation got blown into an Internet event the way it did.

"If this didn't get escalated to Penny Arcade, it would have never gone viral like it did," he said. "Ultimately, if I was able to control the customer, it never would have happened. I've dealt with thousands and thousands of customers with similar complaints, they were all asking the same question. When is it big enough that it hits the news? When it hits Penny Arcade, when it hits a guy who has the biggest affiliations in the industry."

Moving on. Despite the harassment, Christoforo says he still respects the gaming community he says he's been a part of for decades.

"I still love the gaming community, and this is not going to change my mind," he said. "I do think these people were a little bit excessive with the spam, digging up personal information, calling me. Not to put anyone down, but I don't know what kind of lives these people have. ... Ultimately it doesn't affect the way I think about anybody. I don't have any hate or bad will for them, but it's a little bit sad that they didn't have anything better to do than attack me."

Christoforo said he's also been able to laugh at some of the funnier parodies and jokes at his expense out there, particularly a well-made video featuring an over-the-top actor playing an exaggerated version of him.

"I'm not depressed at people making fun of me," he said. "It's like a parody of Barack Obama. It's making me more popular. I'm not doing anything to stop it, and it is kind of funny. ... It's not the end of the world, and it'll be old news soon, but it's hot news now, and I do see the lighter side of it."

While Christoforo didn't completely rule out legal action against Penny Arcade and the sources of some of the more vicious Internet slander and threats, he said he probably will not actually call an attorney. That's partly because he's not sure there's a legal case to be made, but also because he doesn't want his name dragged down any further, he said. 

"[Legal action] is something I'm not interested in doing because the community would be more pissed at me," he said. "Regardless of money [possibly won in a settlement], it would really ruin my name. Am I saying I care more about my reputation than money? Yes."

But Christoforo also sees some potential positives in all the negative attention he's been getting. His Twitter account, which has now changed names twice because he was "sick of the tweets and stuff coming in," has been getting a lot of new followers from the controversy, he noted, a situation that may be beneficial down the line.

"If these people stick with me and follow me, a couple months down the road anything I say is news," he said. "If it gets me somewhere else that I wouldn't have been where this happened ... it's negative now, but controversy and bad news is news and that's just the way it is. Look at all the bad press from people in entertainment industry that turned into something good. Whether I do charity work or something good, I don't know."

In the nearer term, Christoforo has entertained the idea of doing some Internet videos himself, and even considered going to PAX East, held in Boston this April, with a shirt tauntingly saying 'I'm Paul Christoforo' on it. "I'm not sure I'd actually do that, since I don't want to get in any fights," he clarified.

So what lessons has Christoforo taken from his brush with Internet infamy? "I'll definitely stay away from customer service emails," he said. "I could have nipped this all in the bud by being a little nicer. You never know who knows who, and lesson learned. We all have bad days and they caught me on one."

"At the end of the day, I'm a human being, and it feels like the entire world was bullying me," he said. "I want people to like me, I don't want people to think I'm a bad person. ... I made a mistake. ... I hope I can make something positive out of it."

Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he got his start with a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal web site, KyleOrland.com. Republished with permission.

We're coming to the conclusion of our Best Game Music of 2011 series—there are only two games left! I've been having a lot of fun writing these, and thanks to Luke and Evan for their entries as well.

As I've been doing the posts, I've been getting lots of notes from readers about game soundtracks you guys would like to see included. The comments, too, have been filled with tons of great suggestions. Since this series isn't some all-encompassing, definitive list, I thought it would be fun to compile reader submissions, giving you guys a chance to share your favorite music while recognizing the soundtracks for games that I either didn't have time to write about or didn't have time to play.

Here's what we'll do: In the comments section of this post, Put a YouTube video of a song from the soundtrack you're nominating, along with an explanation of why you think the music is great. No need to be super technical or anything, just explain why you dig the song—the part of the game it plays alongside, how it makes you think of other games, whatever. Maybe try to avoid spoilers, though.

I'll go through them over the next couple of days and assemble the best ones into a post that will run on Friday afternoon.

Have at it!

News that Kid Icarus: Uprising will feature both local and online multiplayer was followed up with this video showing the game's online play in action.

The gameplay looks like free-roaming third-person shooter with wings and some fancy weapons. Players seem to team up, light versus dark, in this video. Though there's also a free-for-all Battle Royale mode.

Kid Icarus: Uprising is due out on North American 3DS on March 23.

[via Sidemission]

A "Mocachu" as seen on GameTrailer's SideMission Twitter account.

When the original DS launched Nintendo gave us Pictochat, a decent local wireless program for chatting and exchanging pictures with our friends. When the 3DS launched, casual chatting was nowhere to be seen. Swapnote fixes that.

Available for download now in the 3DS eShop, Swapnote does exactly what the name implies, allowing users to swap scribbled notes back and forth with their friends. Players can send notes, sketch images, attach photos, and even sound files to their messages. You can even swap messages with folks you pass in the street thanks to the 3DS' StreetPass feature.

It sounds simple and cute, sure, but Swapnote could change everything. Or at least everything about how we swap pictures of our genitalia.

It's not my fault. It's human nature to offer up our reproductive organs to any new form of artistic impression that comes along. Prehistoric drawings are somewhere around 75 percent penis, for example. Entire genres of music have grown around the coupling of private parts. They're the only reason the role of bassist exists in modern rock.

I'm making all of this up as I go along, but damn if it isn't making me feel better.

Of course the point of Swapnote is that it's a fun new way to express your creativity and have fun with your 3DS friends. Want to be mine? Here's my code: 1418-6914-6778. Try not to get your crotch all over it.