Video game retailer GameStop lets you trade in games for cash. You don't have to bring in the original packaging. So sometimes, when trying to re-sell those used games, GameStop will stick them in those generic, blank cases that look terribly ugly on your living room shelf.

But sometimes friendly employees make their own versions. This Dragon Age: Origins box, found in an EB Games over in Canada, was sent to Kotaku this morning. Almost as good as the original. Almost.

(Thanks, Brandon.)

They've sort of added multiplayer to Skyrim via the game's new Kinect voice-control update. Not real multiplayer. Not the kind that lets two people play the game together or against each other. No, they've simply added voice commands. But when a friend barges in on your gaming session and yells "ally attack" and then "quicksave" while you're just visiting a town, well, you get the best kind of griefing that you usually can only get from multiplayer games.

"Ally attack" will start fights in towns where your friend might not have wanted to start fights. This will begin the bloodbath.

And "quicksave" will simply overwrite your friend's last quicksave.

Walk in on your Skyrim-playing friends and do this to them. They'll love it! (They won't.)

The aggrieved player will probably want to reboot the game or at least load an old save to revert to their more peaceful version of their adventure.

Think of the fun you can have with this! Surely, this is why they didn't make Kinect voice controls speaker-specific, right? Microsoft wanted to encourage people to mess with each other. That's my theory, at least.

Protesters around the world are commemorating today's May Day with rallies in support of workers and against the economic and political powers that be. Much of this has been peaceful or at least standard Occupy-style protest-and-arrest, but in Seattle, in the same downtown area where tens of thousands of gamers gather each year to attend the Penny Arcade Expo, some protesters are smashing windows.

Seattle's KIRO-TV tweets: "Raw video: Black-clad protesters smash Niketown windows in Seattle"

Here's the video. (One of the protesters appears to be wearing... Nike shoes.)

It's ugly out there in Seattle. Smashing windows in a Niketown? It gets press, but it's not clear what productive point it makes. It seems about as productive as dressing up as a super-hero and pepper-spraying the protestors.

But here's the more peaceful scene outside the Seattle offices of Popcap, as Tweeted by the company's Jeff Green.

Violence erupts as May Day protesters flood streets [KIRO-TV, via Twitter]

Cosplayers and model creators will all give you fairly similar advice to starting a new project. It begins with a ton of hours spent on the Internet for research, and ends with paint, polish, and possibly some decals.

Psychobob has experience creating awesome 3D models of game characters and pieces. After the research, printing, sculpting and painting, this awesome model of Portal 2's Atlas was born.

His cyclops eye has even been wired to glow a soft blue. Creator Psychobob documented the construction of mini-Atlas over at his blog, which is an interesting look at what goes into building models like these.

3D Print: Atlas (Portal) Part1 [Psychobob Arts]

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It's easy to take personal offense when you disagree with a game review. It's easy to believe dissenting opinions mask ulterior motives.

"How could that guy love Dragon Age 2?" you might think to yourself. "That game sucked! EA must have paid him off."

Or maybe you're angry about a video game's ending. Or a designer's disparaging comments about Japanese games. Whatever the subject, it can be easy (and gratifying) to get together with likeminded gamers and form a digital mob to take down your newfound opponent (who you will go on to forget about after a week or two, when the next controversy comes along).

Posting on his blog Insult Swordfighting today, writer Mitch Krpata has penned a reasonable essay asking mobs to tone it down a notch. Here's an excerpt:

The way so many people default to this line of attack tells me that they don't have anything substantive to say. They just want to gang up on someone. They want to elevate a simple disagreement into a clash of good versus evil — with themselves radiating pure white light, of course, no matter what garbage they sling, because they are armed with the correct opinion about a video game.

...

Really, though, it's not this particular case that bothers me as much as the pattern. Whether it's a negative review of The Witcher 2, or the ending of Mass Effect 3, or somebody saying he felt weird at PAX, the story is the same every time. The mob moves, locust-like, from one controversy to the next, with no sense of perspective or decency. They'll pick Bobby Hunter's bones clean today, forget the whole thing within a month, and then swarm the next one who strays from the pack. Guaranteed.

Read the whole piece—it's a great reminder that passionate disagreement is almost always a good thing.

An impassioned plea for apathy [Insult Swordfighting]

We all (probably) play a ton of video games and watch a ton of anime. Sometimes we get invested in the stories and the characters, and sometimes their fiction is relatable. Making a connection to these media can translate to real-life changes. Commenter bakura wants to know how they've impacted you on today's Speak Up.

Is there a video games or an anime or another form of activity that you do that changed your life ?

For me :

The Anime Nodame Cantabile make me realise how great Classic Music is!
Same as the game series The Blackwell Legacy for the Jazz
or Bioshock for the 30s-50s music.
The game Phoenix Wright had a character Gomshoe, you is laughing while moving his soulder and im going just like that.
The Drama Attention Please make me forgot my fear of plane, and I watched it (coincidence) just before flying to France.
The Anime Gurren Lagann teach me to be proud of my name and to have faith in myself. (also the hero name is Simon and mine too, and we are physicaly and mentaly similar so I kinda get a special link with him)

Well, aw.

I have to admit a fondness for Leonard Nimoy's Hobbit Song, but this is on a whole new level. For starters, it's actually good.

Songwriter Allie Goertz and vocalist Megan Barrett perform this heartwarming duet about Bilbo Baggins, the shire, and the quest that lies before him. It's great stuff.

Take a little musical break from your internet comings and goings and give it a listen. You'll be glad you did.

Stick around for the bridge:

There is a fire in the hearts of all
Beyond the shire you may soon feel tall
ooh-ooh

You can find Allie Goertz on facebook and check out her music on bandcamp.

Thanks, Gary!

Halo 4's not the only AAA game with a real-life movie lead-in. Ubisoft's just announced that their near-future squad shooter will be preceded by Ghost Recon Alpha, a 26-minute live-action film that will air on G4.

There's a multiplayer map based the locales in the film and scenes in the film will lead up to events in the game, too. For players who really want the best in-game gear, Alpha will also have a secret code hidden inside it that you can use to unlock a special weapon in Future Soldier. So, if you want to rule the leaderboards, you better set your DVRs for G4 on Thursday, May 3rd at 6:30 PM.

I went to Paris last weekend, which is an extravagant thing to do if you live in New York and should probably be making shorter weekend commutes. But I had a rare chance to go and so off I went, out Thursday overnight, back Monday afternoon.

I wasn't supposed to be working, but I can't shut off the video-game-reporter part of my brain. While on vacation I did a little work. For your benefit!

That "work" mostly involved snapping photos and learning valuable lessons (mostly) about playing video games as an American in Paris.

Lesson 1

You will not escape the ads for Max Payne 3. It was the only video game I saw advertised in the Paris Metro and on the streets of the city, but it was also one of the things I saw advertised the most.

Fun fact: There were also lots of ads for The Avengers move, which was already out there. Weird.

Lesson 2

Nintendo doesn't want you charging your American 3DS in European electrical sockets. For some dopey reason, Nintendo's official 3DS charger can't handle the voltage of French electrical sockets, even with a necessary travel plug converter connecting the charge cable to a Parisian outlet. A basic travel converter lets you plug in any American-style flat prongs into a European-style socket that takes cylindrical prongs. That's all the gear you need for plugging in and charging an iPad, laptop, iPhone or Vita (trust me, I did all that), but the 3DS will just sit there not taking any juice.

There is a solution! Well, there are probably two fixes: one would be to get a voltage converter, but why? The better solution, the one I used, was to buy a USB charger for the 3DS. I was able to use it to charge my 3DS off my laptop—and also off the back of the seat in the Swiss Air plane I flew to go home.

Lesson 3

They're trying to sell the Vita in Europe, which is more than I can say for any other gaming hardware. Ads for any other hardware were nowhere to be found. I even saw a guy using a Vita... to take a picture of a dog.

I didn't see anyone using a 3DS, but I picked up plenty of people via the system's StreetPass while walking through Paris and Charles de Gaulle airport.

Lesson 4

For some reason there is a lot of video-game-based graffiti in Paris.

It's everywhere!

See?

Lesson 5

There's nothing special about Parisian game shops. The selection is pretty much what you'd get in America. That is the opposite of what you experience in many of the Parisian comic shops (of which there are tons, including an entire street, Rue Dante, that's full of them!).

I might as well have been outside a GameStop.

Lesson 6

The 3DS' 3D camera is a champ when you're taking photos in the Rodin sculpture museum, but it can't handle the Eiffel Tower. It's great with close-ups, but it can't pop any decent 3D with anything—say, a building!—that's more than a few feet away from you. (Download several 3DS pics I took of the sites from this Dropbox link.)

Here is a special piece of possibly-painfully-obvious advice to aspiring 3DS photo-takers who wish to aim their Nintendo portable at tall structures: don't turn your 3DS to snap a vertical photo. You can only see the system's 3D effect when you are holding the machine horizontally. So if you photograph the Eiffel Tower with the system held vertically, you'll only be able to watch the Eiffel Tower pop into 3D on the machine while the system is horizontal. But holding the 3DS horizontally would leave a vertically-photographed Tower on its side.

Lesson 7

The miracle public toilets in Paris clean themselves as soon as you step out of them, scrubbing their toilets and floors through some arcane magic.

This is apparently not new, but, my god, it is amazing.

Lesson 8

Flight attendants still refer to portable gaming machines as Game Boys (when they're telling passengers which electronics can be used after takeoff). I think they're the only people on the planet who still do this.

If you're here in the Panel Discussion programming block, you might be a lapsed comics reader, trying to find a way back to the JLA Satellite. Or you might someone killing time until you pick up your weekly Wednesday pull list. Or maybe you've said goodbye to dozens of longboxes to embrace the promise of digital comics. Whichever it is, you're still interested in the good stuff.

Welcome, then, to the Panel Discussion Dozen Quintet, where I pick out just-released or out-soon comics that I think are worth paying attention to. Ready? Then, let's meet the sequential art that'll be draining your wallet this week.

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Action Comics #9
All you need to know about this latest issue of the stellar Superman title is that Grant Morrison's introducing a black Superman who also happens to be President of the United States. It's almost like he's making it just for me.

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Dial H #1
China Mieville talked a bit two weeks ago about how he planned to write this new version of his dream comic and it's out tomorrow. Having read it already, I can say that it's trippy, down-to-earth and psychologically compelling at the same time. And the superheroes Mieville rolls out in this premiere will haunt your dreams long after you've read it.

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X-O Manowar #1
I have surpisingly fond memories of the Valiant Comics line that was being published in the 1990s, which featured sci-fi, superhero concepts shepherded by former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. A new relaunch uses some of those same characters with brand new talent. X-O Manowar was a book about a barbarian warrior who finds and wields a suit of extraterrestrial power armor. This version comes from Robert Venditti—the writer behind the great cyberpunk crime thiller The Surrogates—and artist Cary Nord, who's done loads of great work for the Big Two. It's a book I'll recommend on the strength of its creative pedigree, despite how goofy the core concept sounds.

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Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City
Guy Delisle makes comics that take readers all over the world. His previous volumes have chronicled travels in North Korea and Myanmar, bringing strongly observed details about those closed-off societies to vibrant life. While Jerusalem isn't as mysterious as those other places, I'm still betting that Delisle's talent for observing human nature will carve out great stories fron his time in the Holy Land.

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Harvey Pekar's Cleveland
Despite his curmudgeonly mien, the late Harvey Pekar stood out as a giant amongst comics creators. His mundane tales about everyday life magnifies the fleeting joys, chilling fears and nagging doubts that haunt all of us yet he never fell away from the urge to celebrate life in all its messiness. This collection represents his last work, with grittily detailed artwork from Josephn Remnant. Fittingly, it's all about Pekar's hometown which, like its native son, may always seem down on its luck but can never be truly counted out.