If you've somehow managed to avoid the avalanche of controversy pouring down on Medal of Honor, here's the gist: you can play as Taliban in the game's multiplayer. Not “the insurgents.” Not “the guys who look suspiciously like Taliban but totally aren't, no really.” Nope. This time around, Medal of Honor's ripping its inspiration straight from the headlines. That, however, didn't fly with GameStop's stores in military bases.

According to a memo received by Kotaku, the decision to pull the game was made “out of respect for our past and present men and women in uniform.”

“As such, GameStop agreed to have all marketing material pulled by noon today and to stop taking reservations. Customers who enter our AAFES stores and wish to reserve Medal of Honor can and should be directed to the nearest GameStop location off base,” it read.

“GameStop fully supports AAFES in this endeavor and is sensitive to the fact that in multiplayer mode one side will assume the role of Taliban fighter.”

Usually, this is where we make some kind of opinionated and – we like to think – well-informed comment. However, seeing as we haven't served, we'd like to ask the following question: Men and women in the military, what are your thoughts on this? Is it as touchy of a subject as GameStop makes it out to be? Or is this just another example of political correctness gone too far?

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We don't mean to laugh at your suffering, Final Fantasy XIV fans, but we have to admit that we find this whole situation pretty amusing. See, Square's slammed the brakes on its FFXIV open beta test, which was scheduled to begin on August 31.

“FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which is scheduled to begin at 19:00 (PDT) on Aug. 31, 2010, will be postponed due to a confirmation of critical bugs. New schedule will be released at a later date,” the developer wrote on FFXIV's official site.

So then, why are we conjuring up our hardest Gigglaga at your expense? Well, here's the thing: aren't beta tests all about sniffing out and squashing the daylights out of “critical bugs”? If we were to yank the phony costume mustache off this “beta test” guy, we're pretty sure we'd find our old buddy “glorified free promotional demo” underneath -- as we have with countless other recent "open betas." Can we just start calling these things by their real names already? 

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These days, it seems like every videogame and its Atari 2600 grandmother is getting a movie tie-in. But hey, games are awesome and so are movies, so where's the problem? Well, see, as it turns out, game movies are not awesome. Not in the slightest. So, is it Game Over for gaming's star on the Hollywood walk of fame? Not necessarily, says Valve's Gabe Newell. We just need to change up our approach, is all.

“Where we got into this direction was after Half-Life 1 had shipped. There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood. Directors down there wanted to make a Half-Life movie and stuff, so they’d bring in a writer or some talent agency would bring in writers, and they would pitch us on their story. And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of,” he explained to PC Gamer.

“That’s when we started saying ‘Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we’d have to make it ourselves.’ And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible.’ But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that.”

And so, on this day, our dream of Jason Statham playing an illogically acrobatic, crowbar-kung-fu master Gordon Freeman – while wearing a phony beard, of course – died a quick death. We're not sure whether to be happy or incredibly depressed about that, honestly.  

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Runic, you speed demons, you! You've already beaten the devil himself to the punch twice, and now – against all odds – you're looking to add even more insult to injury. Speaking with Joystiq, Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer said that he fully expects Torchlight 3 -- not 2, which is slated for a Spring 2011 release -- to hit virtual shelves before Diablo 3 finally escapes from development hell.

"I really think we will, I'm not joking about it. I'll be the first to buy Diablo 3, I'm a huge fan. I just know what it's like over there," Schaefer said when asked if he thinks his third hack 'n' slash RPG will outpace Blizzard's. 

"[Blizzard has] an impossible task. Blizzard can not get away with doing a Torchlight 1. If they put out a single player game, an RPG that's kinda stripped down for $20, people would say, 'What the hell happened to Blizzard?' They don't have that luxury. Everything has to be super epic. More epic than anything that's come before, more epic than World of Warcraft. They have to do that. It puts them in a really tough spot, I don't envy them. It has to be perfect." 

Torchlight, meanwhile, is being developed by a smaller team that – according to Schaefer – will never grow beyond 40 people, with the goal of development cycles that last less than one year.

Honestly, though, we're just happy that both games exist. Diablo's big, bombastic, and epic, and Torchlight keeps us from forfeiting our miniscule sum of sanity while waiting for Diablo 3. It's Yin and Yang. Diablo brings the noise, Torchlight brings the funk. The balance of the world, it seems, revolves around two games about clicking everything that moves and playing medieval dress-up. Without one or the other, we would all surely be destroyed.

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