Every week we do a quick wrap-up of some news items that may have slipped through the cracks. The wrap-ups will be shorter versions of our articles, lumped together to give you an idea of things you may have missed.

PETA Gives Fable 2 Kudos
It’s the sixth annual Proggy Awards, apparently, and that means that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have listed out their top of the pops for companies and products that abide by their animal friendly ideals. When it comes to video games, Lionhead Studios’ Fable 2 has taken the prize home as “an effective tool that teaches gamers the real-life benefits of a vegetarian diet.” In the game sticking to a tofu diet and leafy greens has a “good” lean to it, where eating meat makes you “fat and evil”, which apparently is a great reflection of real life and deserving of the honours for the best game. Previous winners include Nintendogs which was a good preventative for putting real puppies under trees only to be abandoned later. Also Whiplash, a PS2 platformer based around helping animals escape a testing lab where cruel scientists were planning to get rid of them once they had served up their usefulness.

I can see why they may have picked the winners of previous years, but picking Fable to get a couple of jabs in about how meat makes you grotesque and cruel is a bit of twist. Considering in the game you can kick around chickens for fun and even have a part where you can shoot rabbits, but no one tell them. We may get a flash game called Fable 2 – Molyneux Brutalizes Animals coming soon. Actually, that would be kind of awesome.

This Just In: A Lot of People Play Halo 3
Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb, Microsoft’s premier channel for distributing information regarding the Xbox Live platform, has released the top played games of 2008 and it is not surprising to see that Halo 3 has taken the top spot overall, with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, GTA IV and Gears of War 2 filing in behind. Considering the power that the original Gears had even without a full polished multiplayer, it’s certainly telling to see it in the top four only given the two months that it has been out. Not sure how the numbers are adjusted, but it there are a few other notes to be taken from that list. One, Too Human did make the cut…in demo form. That along with Mirror’s Edge and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed only made the top 20 in demo form. Castle Crashers made an appearance at 17, as well, and considering the issues they’ve had with the game that are still unresolved it shows the power of a well-designed side-scroller.

UPDATE: The issues with Castle Crashers are indeed resolved with the latest patch they’ve pushed out over the holiday season. Apologies to the guys at The Behemoth for the mix-up there. You can read the full release notes from their website to see the list of fixes that have been made. Apparently they are getting very good feedback from it, so if you aren’t already playing it you don’t have much of an excuse not to give it a try now.

A lot of games that I didn’t expect to see reach the top managed to make it again this year. The top two were titles released last year, which is a bit worrying but a good demonstration of just how solid the games are online, and while I’ve heard a lot of pooh-poohing for GTA IV‘s online portion it seems to have done rather well for itself. It was also good to see that Braid made the top 3, because it’d be good to know that the creator didn’t have to sell his life away just to pay for the game that many would put on their best of for the entire year. Scary thing is that I think we’ll see a lot of these top contenders back again next year, maybe with a few others sprinkled in, but when a game does well initially that strength will often carry on in the form of well supported or just well designed multiplayer, which a lot of the top titles have.

Activision Succumbs to Shrinking Values
Although I had previously noticed that Activision was avoiding the trend that many other companies in the game industry were on, it turns out that a bad economy does eventually hit everyone. A look at Activision-Blizzard’s stocks now demonstrate a value that is at the level they were 2 years ago well before they had the strength of the merger and the best selling PC game of all time. It’s hard for companies to sell their way into a positive stock growth this year, and while EA is posting significant loses they have shown some gains in their stocks in the last few weeks.

Those crazy market will probably continue to fluctuate in a way that most people won’t understand, but don’t expect Activision to stay down for too long. Revenue speaks loudly, and when the quarterly results show a GDP comparable to many G7 countries [/exaggeration] I’m sure we’ll see a bounce back. For those looking to take this advice to invest, don’t. It’s hard to predict where a lot of these companies are going in terms of market value in the near future, and the true strength of the industry while the US market clutches its wallet tightly has yet to be seen.