Yes, you read that right.  PETA, apparently none too happy with people breeding turkeys and killing them to stuff ourselves on just for a holiday, has gone and put up a gruesome web game: Cooking Mama, The Unauthorized PETA Edition: Mama Kills Animals.

I’m guessing their idea is to so badly gross out the kiddies that they no longer want to eat a deliciously prepared dead animal.  There’s plenty of blood and guts (in cartoon form of course) to delight the sicko in all of us.

Oh … wait … that can’t be right, can it?

Well, hell.  Maybe it can.

If you like cartoonish blood and guts and sick twisted preparation of a Thanksgiving feast, it’s actually kind of funny.  Though I’m thinking they could have worked a little harder on making the interface.  Some of it is quite a challenge, not because it’s actually challenging, but because the instructions are vague at best and don’t show up right away.  I guess that adds to the replayability?  That or the frustration was an intentional psychological push.

But so as you grossly prepare your Thanksgiving feast with Mama, you get rewarded with different PETA movies that I guess are meant to make you like eating animals even less.  And wallpapers.  And eventually you get rewarded with a bonus round of preparing a tofurkey.  (Which I’ve cooked one before, and they’re not stunningly great, but not a bad solution for the vegetarian in your family.)  PETA is trying to turn us away from meat.

Meh.

If they think so.

Let’s face it, a Thanksgiving turkey feast is tradition.  A cute video game isn’t going to make any impact one way or the other.  And frankly, I think PETA really did the opposite of what they intended to on this one.  If you don’t mind a little sicko, it’s a cute game.  But then I’m an adult, and used to help Grandpa ax off turkey heads by holding them down on the stump and then setting them free to run around headless, squirting blood everywhere, on the nice fresh snow.  Certainly not a childhood delight, but at least I always knew what my food was.  Frankly, I think any such lesson for kids these days, be it in cartoon game form like PETA is offering, or in real life experience, is good for the kids.  Yes little Suzie, that’s where your hamburger comes from.  Yes little Timmy, these cute little chicks grow up to be dinner.

After all, when the apocolypse comes, they’ll still know how to make a Thanksgiving dinner.  And isn’t that what really matters?

I think the bigger concern here is actually, what happens if your child enjoys this PETA game a little too much…

It’s one of the best consoles (IMHO the best) on the market right now, the Playstation 3 from Sony. And with its frequent firmware updates, you’d expect all of those little glitches to be fixed by now. But yet there remains one persistent related set of glitches that Sony has yet to fix: volume control.

Say what?!

Yeah.

For example, I put in a game. The volume on my TV i set to 8. It’s plenty loud. I put in a CD. The volume is still set to 8. But because it’s a party I kick it up to 12. Oooh. All is still relative. All is good. Music at 12 is loud, because I want it loud. No one plays hard rock softly.

Then I pop in a movie.

And to get the same volume, I have to crank the TV all the way up to 50. Yes, that’s right, 50!

“No big deal,” you say. And partly I agree, because at least my TV’s volume goes up far enough to adjust for the suddenly quiet PS3. But forget that you have the volume set so freaking high just to reach normal audible levels when you turn your PS3 off and switch input back over to the cable box, and you’re hit by a deluge of sound not unlike the blast of a percussion grenade. Because, remember, normal volume level is in the 8-12 range, not 50. Fifty!

If Sony can’t for some reason fix the sound output during movies to be in the same line as every game played on the same machine, at least Sony could put into the PS3 a setting to adjust the volume for each function (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, game, etc.) so that the user can fix the volume.

But wait, that’s not all.

When was the last time you tried to play an online game on the Playstation 3? Have you used the chat while playing a game to taunt your opponents? It’s neat that I can take the Bluetooth headset for my cell phone and synch it up to my PS3 to use to chat. There’s even a much-needed microphone gain adjustment. (Not to mention the voice-changer. How nice of someone to program that in, as if the world needed that feature first.) But what is that? Again, there’s no output volume adjustment. It’s bad enough barely hearing anything through the headset even with the headset’s volume maxed out. But then I find a neat setting to put the audio out through the PS3’s line out instead of through the headset. That way I can hear the audio of people chatting even when I don’t bother to pull out the headset.

Except …what was that problem again? Right, no volume control. And so no, I actually can’t hear the chat. At all. In theory I could, but the volume level of the chat is much like the movie volume, waaaaaaaaaaaaay under the normal volume level for everything else. And so over the sounds of the game, you can’t hear a single whisper to save your life.

Solution? The same. A setting to adjust the volume is needed.

When I first bought my PS3, I really didn’t mind these problems. The device was new. Teething problems are expected. And, relatively speaking, they’re little things. But with as much time as Sony has had, why has this problem not been fixed yet? Can I somehow be the only person to have ever had these problems on the Playstation 3? Is my box somehow “special”?

Sony, fix the f__king volume problems already! Sheesh!

Oh my gods!

Everywhere hardcore 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons geeks are in mourning!

For those of you who aren’t geeks like me, Gary Gygax co-authored Dungeons and Dragons from the very beginning. He was one of the most ingenious people to ever grace TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), the makers of Dungeons and Dragons. His inspiration was the heart and soul of AD&D. After he left TSR, Dungeons and Dragons was just never the same. And now, it never will be. Gary, you will be missed.