Of all the excellent – and anticipated – video games being released this fall, the ongoing sagas started in Gears of War and Resistance: Fall of Man were two of the biggest.

I take a look at the two games in this week’s “Trigger Happy” column in the Georgia Straight.

For better or worse, many of this fall’s video-game releases are sequels. Two of the biggest, Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2, have much in common but are ultimately very different games. Both, though, are bound to satisfy the hard-core gamers they were developed for.

I spent a chunk of time on Monday morning hanging out with Matt Levitan and Kyle Moffatt from Playstation Canada.

They were in Vancouver to meet with members of the media and to show off some of the great games coming this fall to a Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable near you. I’ll be writing about some of them in the weeks to come, but there were two pieces of information revealed to me that are worth sharing.

The first is that Sony is releasing a keypad, which attaches to the PS3 controller, and makes it easier to enter text in the various Playstation 3 environments. The device, which will be available in the first weeks of December, is Bluetooth enabled and will retail for $49.99.

That keypad will make it easy to chat with friends and strangers in Playstation Home, the virtual world that Sony’s been trumpeting since the PS3 was launched in 2006.

Levitan and Moffatt walked me through the latest incarnation of Home, which is currently in a closed beta test phase. The functionality of the social networking space is close to what was originally promised.

We decorated a personal apartment space, visited the bowling alley where you can bowl and shoot pool, and hung out at the virtual mall where there were impromptu dance parties, chess matches, and movie trailers being screened.

Levitan said the mall is a great place for multimedia opportunities, suggesting that Sony could decide to stream films from their archive for free in the “theatre” and that new bands could benefit from listening stations installed throughout the mall.

Home, Levitan and Moffatt said, will be available before the end of the year.

It is free, too, a service provided for anyone with a Playstation 3 console.

So for the price tag of $399, Levitan said, consumers get a game console, one of the best Blu-ray players on the market, and access to a Second Life-like virtual world.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight.

Last year, C and I decided to initiate a new tradition of giving during the holiday season by making a donation to a worthy charity.

Last year I – selfishly – lobbied for the One Laptop Per Child organization, which was running a “buy one, give one” campaign. Purchase one of the OLPC computers for yourself, and by paying double the cost of your unit, an extra computer would be sent to a child in one of the participating countries.

As part of their ongoing efforts to make a difference in developing nations by providing the tools for education, culture, and activism, OLPC has launched a new site in which they are asking people around the world to add to the equation to change the world.

The visual representation of the equation is growing fast. Each factor in the equation is an individual. Imagine just how long the equation will become in a month, or a year.

The Georgia Straight today includes my latest “Trigger Happy” column, which this week looks at some recent games released for digital download on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Store services.

If you shudder every time you think about shelling out $80 for a video game to play on your next-generation console, you should consider some of the smaller games available through the digital storefronts that are part of these systems. Not only are these arcade, casual, and indie downloads cheaper, they’re just as much fun. Sometimes more.

Too Human, the long-awaited game from Ontario developer Silicon Knights, has finally been released. An attempt to blur the action and RPG genres, it’s a game with some problems, but is worth playing. The game is the subject of my latest “Trigger Happy” column in the Georgia Straight.

It’s fitting, in a way, that Too Human is inspired by Norse mythology and features Loki, a character bent on creating chaos. The lengthy development cycle for the action-adventure role-playing game from Canada’s Silicon Knights was filled with obstacles, almost as if the trickster deity was at play.

Also in today’s Straight is my review of Too Human.

Too Human, the long-awaited title from venerable Canadian developer Silicon Knights, is a breathless fighting game that puts players in the role of Norse god Baldur.