Katamari and Persona fans may be interested in the releases of Katamari Forever on PS3 and the PSP RPG, respectively, this week is all about Halo: ODST. Call it an expansion, complain about the pricing, whatever you want. But it’s Halo, it’ll sell itself. FPSes with a healthy helping of cursing and teabagging in online games? Makes me wish I’d been able to get that $99 XBox 360 deal from Future Shop. Jerks.

How NOT to run a contest, courtesy of our friends at Future Shop: First, make a contest where people have to find clues on your website, or Twitter, or forums, etc. But the prize in the contest isn’t free stuff, but stuff at a huge discount (ie. $99 XBox 360 Elite with GTA4). Then, in a NATIONAL promotion, make all of FIVE available. Sounds awesome, huh? But wait! Let’s make it more fun. Have a programming glitch result in the price not resetting to normal after the whopping five prizes are claimed. This results in likely hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people thinking they just got a ridiculously awesome deal on a 360. Now watch said customers get progressively more angry as you start cancelling their orders. Now you’ve got angry nerds. Angry MESSAGE BOARD nerds. Angry message board nerds on a website dedicated to sharing deals and ideas to help you pay less for stuff (RedFlagDeals). Yeah. Nicely done.

Professor Layton took a weird turn for me in Chapter 3. Puzzles haven’t gotten too much harder, but the story just got weird. This is pretty much the only game I’m playing now, save for a few plays of Madden 10 on the iPhone here and there. May actually need to take the iPhone in as I’m very close to the warranty expiring and it would seem that the microphone part is being tempermental. Hopefully I don’t get screwed on this, cause the iPhone won’t be cheap to replace. Suddenly though, I’m thinking I might get that extra year of AppleCare for it just to be sure.