BioWare's Mass Effect franchise was one of the studio's more successful ventures, selling an ungodly number of copies for both the original game and its sequel across a number of systems. Stunningly, Dragon Age managed to outsell not just that franchise, but according to BioWare's Rob Bartel the game has apparently beaten sales records of all their other titles as well. That makes it all the more confusing as to why they've apparently decided to heavily emulate Mass Effect while creating Dragon Age 2, out next year.

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Last week the HHS Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability held a two-day talk to reconsider the 1985 ban on accepting donations of blood by men who have had sex with men since 1977. The US' ban has repeatedly been criticised by blood banks, medical experts and various associations as being based on no science but simply paranoia. Even though it's come up for reconsideration a few times, the ban has never been removed and sadly last week's attempt was no different. Despite soliciting opinions over the issue, the committee voted 9-6 to leave the ban in place, ignoring the advice from people who know what they are talking about who said such a ban was discriminatory and worthless.

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On Friday, the magical and revolutionary iPad was finally released internationally, arriving "down under" at 8 AM. Like a couple hundred others, I stood in line outside the Apple Store to buy one. Given my previous thoughts and commentary on the device, such an announcement may seem surprising. And yes, I went into the purchase unsure as to whether or not I would be keeping it or returning it in a few days, thinking it would be simply something shiny that I'd get tired of in a short amount of time.

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Steam announced yesterday that they had partnered up with Prima, long the purveyor of official "strategy guides" for games like Mass Effect 2 and Prince of Persia, to offer downloadable versions of their guides through Valve's platform. At first glance I liked this idea a lot, but after buying one of them it seemed like a waste of money.

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Last week Wolfire Games announced the "Humble Indie Bundle," a collection of five popular indie games packaged together under one price. The enticing factor was that you could choose to pay whatever you wanted for the package. One might think the lack of DRM coupled with the ability to get a number of stellar games for as little as a penny would mitigate the need to pirate the collection. But on a blog post to their site, one of the co-founders of Wolfire Games posted numbers indicating that he believes around 25% of direct downloads of the bundle are pirated.

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Completely escaping my attention, in the beginning of March, Microsoft reversed a long-standing policy against the inclusion of qualifiers for sexual orientation within Xbox Live profiles. Though there were several cases of players having their accounts suspended over this, the issue really came to a head last February when The Consumerist ran a story about "Teresa" who allegedly had her account banned following habitually abusive behaviour by other players because she said she was a lesbian in her profile.

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A Hooked Gamers editorial published last week and making the blog rounds today makes the claim that Ubisoft's always-on DRM plan, which I've discussed here already, is actually pretty cool or something. Through a rambling escapade of analogies and references to electrical plugs on planes and the 360's common red-ring-of-death, in the end the final judgement is that Ubisoft's DRM is both progressive and "ahead of its time."

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