This week on Hit or Miss: Microsoft's Gears of War 3 rollout suffers more catastrophic road bumps than the Large Hadron Collider; a U.K. school uses Grand Theft Auto 4 to teach children (presumably about how not to do every single thing in Grand Theft Auto 4); Microsoft makes their ridiculously deceitful points system only kind of deceitful; and Hideo Kojima explains how Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker's product placements totally aren't product placements.
 
Note that I'm getting absolutely no payments whatsoever for the 15 different brands I mention in this article. Life just isn't fair, I tells ya.
 
 
 
First creator Cliff Bleszinski gets bumped by Justin Bieber on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (there's like three different parts of that clause that boggle the mind), then the first gameplay details get leaked by Edge anyway, and then Microsoft themselves leak the frickin' announcement by forgetting to change the timing of their own Xbox Live spotlight.
 
Jesus, Microsoft. Why not just go ahead and hire a drunken pilot to skywrite "Gears of War 3!" and end up crashing into a petting zoo? Or launch a contest to let fans name a new character in the game, and forget to give yourselves a legal out just in case fans unanimously choose "Ballsy Face Fart"? Or build a large, shoddily crafted Gears of War 3 theme park ride that accidently maims someone? 
 
Realize that in the above paragraph where I conjured ridiculous ways for the rollout to have gone even worse, I could have written, "Bump Cliff Bleszinski for Justin Bieber on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" and it wouldn't have stuck out at all. When reality and parody collide, what do you call that?
 
Is this one of those androids whose love is real, but he is not?
 
 
I'm a little conflicted here. On the one hand, it's undeniably a good thing that a school would rise above the idiotic narratives of idiotic cable news networks and realize video games — even the violent ones — can with proper usage teach kids lessons about right and wrong.
 
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Grand Theft Auto has absolutely no lessons to teach anyone about right and wrong. Look, I love GTA as much as the next sociopath, but this is not a game packed with the moral ambivalence of a BioShock or Mass Effect. GTA doesn't so much give you choices between right and wrong as give you choices that range on a spectrum of wrong, kind of wrong, really wrong, and let us never speak of this again.
 
As such, I imagine the lesson plan going something like…
 
BAD: Having sex with a hooker and murdering her afterword.
 
GOOD: Don't have sex with a hooker and murder her afterward.
 
BAD: Doing violent odd jobs for low-level mob captains because you're an immigrant with little other options in life.
 
GOOD: Don't be an immigrant. Just, you know, in general.


"Basically, just stand still and don't do anything in life, children."
 
 
I'm pretty sure that from the first moment I ever purchased a batch of Microsoft Points, my account total has never again reached zero.
 
Trying to figure out the perfect combination of Marketplace crap to buy and end up with zero points is like trying to solve that puzzle in Die Hard with a Vengeance, where they had a three gallon jar and a five gallon jar and had to figure out how to fill up exactly four gallons. There has to be a solution, but the devious fucks deciding the rules aren't going to make it easy for you.
 
And this is yet another of the many ridiculously evil greed tactics that can only work in the nebulous, villainous world of digital transactions. Imagine if the next time you went to Publix for a $3.50 carton of milk, the checkout lady went, "That'll be 260 Publix Points" and explains they're only purchasable in $5 quantities. Sure, I'd probably give in because damn it all I need to eat my Frosted Flakes, but I would not be happy with it.
 
(By the way, I bet a lot of you reading this are wondering what the hell a Publix is. Hearing about someone else's regional supermarket chain always feels like looking into a parallel dimension, doesn't it?)
 
So yes, it's nice that Microsoft changed their point increments and made the entire system a little less scumbaggish. But there's a reason they made this change so quietly: They didn't want to remind everyone how scumbaggish the tactic was to begin with.
 
 
Earlier this week, series creator Hideo Kojima announced that Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will feature tie-ins with real-world brands like Doritos, Pepsi, Mountain Due, Axe Body Spray, Sony's Walkman, Apple's iPad, NASA, those annoying "White one! *punch* Black one! *punch*" Volkswagen commercials, the Shake Weight, Economist magazine, the hit Starz! original series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and — paradoxically — Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker itself.
 
I don't even know how many of those are true, but fuck it, they may as well be. But while Peace Walker is essentially the video game equivalent of I, Robot, the best part about all this isn't the naked commercialism; it's Kojima's tweet about how this totally isn't naked commercialism.
 
"Regarding the collaborations, I have one reason for doing them. It's because I want to surprise the players," wrote Kojima, presumably while snapping into a Slim Jim. "If the surprise and freshness were lost, I would stop the collaborations. It's different from Hollywood-style merchandizing."
 
Yes, surprises. Just like all those other classic secrets in video game history. Who doesn't remember the infamous secret room in Adventure?
 
 
Or Big Heads mode in NBA Jam?
 
 
And of course, Psycho Mantis's cookie-reading trick in the PC version of Metal Gear Solid.