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Anyone who works with 1UP/EGM Editor-in-Chief James Mielke knows that the guy is pretty darn immersed in his job -- he works as hard as he can to keep creating the coolest content that you see in the mag and on our sites. The past few weeks he was a bit distracted, though. Why? Because he was putting together the final preparations for his proposal to his awesome girlfriend (and now awesome fiance -- she said yes!) Joy. It's something he'd been planning for over a year (I remember when he first told me that he was going to do it), but he had been making all the preparations the past few months.

So what did he do to make the event extra special? He called upon two of the creators of the Final Fantasy series -- composer Nobuo Uematsu and artist/designer Yoshitaka Amano -- to help him out. Amano designed the ring for him and Uematsu composed a melody that played as he proposed. For James and Joy -- two members of the videogame industry, both big fans of the Final Fantasy series -- this was perfectly fitting and definitely a proposal in a league of its own. (Never mind that it was her birthday and he took her to Paris).

(The ring Yoshitaka Amano designed)

The best part was that he was able to get on film the process of asking both Amano and Uematsu for their help earlier this year. Here's the video, including Uematsu playing the original melody for the first time.

Anyway, he detailed the whole thing on his blog, so definitely give it a read and wish him congrats!

Celebrate, homebrew fans -- while Sony had managed to evade the attempts of hackers to crack into the latest iteration of the PlayStation Portable, the PSP 3000, it's finally been accomplished. Sure, we knew it was inevitably going to be cracked since it was released in October, but with the talent of hackers these days, I'm surprised when things aren't hacked as soon as they're released.

Of course, this comes at a price -- $30, to be exact. A new battery from the England-based maker of Action Replay, Datel, enables users to put the PSP in service mode, reports Maxconsole.net. From there, you'll be able to downgrade the system's firmware, thereby allowing you to access all of those wonderful (albeit typically illegal) tools, apps, and emulators you've no doubt heard of. The battery features a convenient switch to allow you to jump between service mode and normal mode and functions with both the PSP 3000 and 2000.

The Datel 'Lite Blue Tool' battery is being released on November 28 for $30 in North America and $20 in the UK. A technical explanation (containing fancy words such as "de-capsulated") of how the feat was accomplished can be found at Maxconsole. Those interested in picking up the new battery can find it's now available for preorder from Datel's online store.

Your move, Sony.

At first glance, <a href="Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ looks like an awesome freak accident involving Ikari Warriors and Capcom's Darkstalkers. Upon closer inspection, though, it's just not as enjoyable as either of those classics. Zombie BBQ is essentially a vertical-scrolling shooter; quite an innovative one at times, but for the most part, it's tedious and overly fussy. It casts players as one of two selectable protagonists: Little Red Riding Hood and Momotaro (bringing the bedtime heroine and the Japanese storybook character together for the first time). The premise is simple: Begin each level at the bottom of the screen, blasting everything that stands between you and the end of the level -- which is always punctuated by some sort of boss battle or miniboss encounter. You use the DS stylus to direct your machine gun or throwing stars (which offer unlimited ammo, but require reloading); this does a good job of emulating 360 degrees worth of shot angles. Enemies -- primarily zombies -- erupt from the ground and march their way downscreen, which is where the bulk of the problems arise.

Since Zombie BBQ doesn't feature a scoring system, you have very little reason to shoot the zombies at all, since most of them walk right on by without so much as glancing your way. Shooting them just gives you something to do as the screen slowly trundles by at a glacial pace. In theory, you could just press left and right and avoid the zombies altogether...at least until you progress deep enough to discover the more mobile skeletons who throw skulls at you, or the coffins that pop out of the ground to do the same. It's mostly slow going until you reach the mid- to high-level stages, at which point almost too much stuff's happening at any given moment. The zombies multiply in excessive numbers; they become too hard to dodge with all the crap flying at you, and it's obvious that the developers implemented things like exploding barrels to help alleviate the chaos -- except they're usually too far from the zombies to offer much help at all. And -- when you haven't accidentally blown these barrels up with friendly fire meant for an incoming zombie -- they inflict little splash damage, which makes them less effective than just shooting enemies head-on. Power-ups (like flamethrowers and shotguns) hidden in crates scattered around each stage offer meager variety, as none of them last very long and aren't powerful enough to bother with.