After losing three consecutive games of FIFA 2008 (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PSP, DS) to his brother and a friend, 17-year-old James Callaghan nearly emptied a bottle of vodka, armed himself with an axe and a long-bladed knife, and went on a drunken rampage around the neighborhood that left an unfortunate 65-year-old widow dead.

With all the concerns circulating violent video games, horror author Stephen King joins in on the discussion. Writing novels for more than four decades, he's one of those credible enough to speak about the matter. Instead of writing down what he believes in, King chooses to speak up his mind. Find out what he said in the full article.

Activist lawyer Jack Thompson has been on the case of violent games and their developers for years now, and he's provoked the ire of gamers time and again. We're looking back at some of the most memorable quotes he's ever dropped, and we've chosen the twenty best out of them all. See the full list of Jack Thompson's most memorable quotes right after the jump!

University of Southern California sociologist Karen Sternheimer notes in an article in the winter issue of the American Sociological Association's Contexts magazine, that while a lot of folks tend to hold video games responsible for the violent youth, they tend to ignore that as videogame play has skyrocketed, youth violence has plummeted.

In the ten years since Doom's release – the game often blamed for the infamous Columbine High School shooting – juvenile homicide arrest rates fell 77 percent. And now, students have less than a 7 in 10 million chance of being killed at school. Sternheimer notes:

It is equally likely that more aggressive people seek out violent entertainment. ...After adult rampage shootings in the workplace, which happen more often than school shootings, reporters seldom mention if the shooters played video games.

Sternheimer adds that in the end, placing the blame on videogames removes the culpability of the criminals. This is tempting for most, especially when white, middle-class boys who live in the suburbs of America are the culprits. Sternheimer writes:

When boys from "good" neighborhoods are violent, they seem to be harbingers of a "new breed" of youth, created by video games rather than by social circumstances. White, middle-class killers retain their status as children easily influenced by a game, victims of an allegedly dangerous product. African-American boys, apparently, are simply 'dangerous.'

As for previous studies that have shown that videogames did increase aggressive behavior, Sternheimer says that those don't offer much insight as to why only a few isolated kids, and not the millions of others who play the games, decide to pick up real weapons and shoot people.

If you're a but more curious about the subject, a copy of  Karen Sternheimer's article can be had via our "read" link below.

I'm not sure how many of you remember the game that allowed you to wreak havoc on whole cities with three super-sized, destruction-thirsty beasts called George, Lizzie and Ralph. Fighting off annoying police helicopters, picking innocent people out of skyscrapers and crushing tanks with your feet was always a hilarious experience, especially together with a friend. Arcade gamers may recall it more fondly than home console gamers, since almost every port of Rampage to a console was a mediocre to abysmal effort. Which is kind of sad because Rampage is one of those arcade games that aged rather well, at least in my opinion.

Now the latest version brought to consoles was Rampage: Total Destruction for the Gamecube and Playstation 2. As usual, it received rather mixed reviews. Now it might step into the spotlight again.

It looks like Midway has decided to bring a beefed-up version of Total Destruction to the Wii. Admittedly, not every Wii game needs to make extensive use of the new controls, but Rampage is without doubt a game that could benefit from it. Puts the "Wii as a multiplayer-encouraging console" thing into a whole new perspective.

Also, it's rumored that a DS version of the game is also planned. Whether it'll make use of the touchscreen, we have no idea, but sources close to Midway have indicated that official announcements of the games might follow very soon.

As a Rampage fan I really hope that Midway now takes the chance to bring Total Destruction up to standards. It's finally time that more people can appreciate the game. And should they bork it up again, well maybe Nintendo should eventually decide to expand the Virtual Console line up to include select Arcade titles...