I blame Sega of America's advertising dept...

of course, sometimes they got it right:

Now that the DS Lite has hit Korea, they've wasted no time in making some amazing skins available for the handheld. These are really beautiful, and if you're headed to Seoul I'll pay you back...

In other news around Southeast Asia: ever wonder where game company names come from? Well, JC Barnett has all your answers right here. Back to Korea, where despite years of shunning the Japanese-manufactured console market (for obvious reasons), there is a slow movement to embrace console gaming on the peninsula. Accordingly, given how tech-savvy the S. Koreans are, the big three game shops are gearing up for a new kind of war in the S. Korean gaming market.

Finally, despite the fact that it's typically a disturbingly peaceful place, Japan's crime news continues to be punctuated with exceptionally shocking and tragic murders, including this one describing how a man and his mother were murdered by a youth who was trying to obtain money to support his arcade gaming habit. Contrast this to the USA, where we have murders and gun violence galore, but despite the best efforts of many out-of-touch firebrands it's not always possible to link the violence to videogames. This was the case with the tragic Salt Lake shooting rampage, where the teen was found to have owned no console or computer games, and not to have played them much at all. Despite the fact that Jackass Thompson earlier speculated that the shooter played GTA...

Sigh.