This was a great week for interesting stories, including a review of an impressively small but powerful Nerf gun and thoughts on the lyrics of a hymn used in the latest Bioshock Infinite trailer. We also revisited our Child's Play drive, with some impressive results. Come inside and see what you might have missed.

How much do you love shooting galleries? The 240 point ($3) Real Big Shootin' DLC pack for the Kinect-enabled Gunstringer gives you a series of shooting galleries, and basically hopes you'll be content with them. You move your hand to aim the reticle at the bad guys, jerk your hand up to fire, and you try to shoot all the targets. That is the entirety of the content.

The good news is that it's enough. There are dozens of different missions, each one with different bad guys, different weapons, or added challenges such as the limitation of only being able to shoot one bullet at a time. Maybe you'll get the use of a flamethrower so you can simply wave your hand around and burn everything you see. The more accurate you shoot, the better your score, and there is both offline multiplayer and scoreboards to keep your interest up.

We've been running our own Child's Play drive this time of the year for the past few years, and it has long been one of my favorite projects. We set this year's first goal at $10,000 when we launched the drive, and we've smashed that goal pretty handily: we're proud to announce our total rests at $17,531 raised from readers of Ars Technica.

I can't say rests, actually, because donations continue to come in, and keeping track of how many people are donating and keeping a record of our total is a large part of my day right now. Can you imagine what it's like to wade through piles of e-mails that prove the generosity of people? It's like grunt work that feeds your soul. If you head over to the official Child's Play site, you'll also see the Ars Technica logo under the Platinum Sponsors section, and we're in some wonderful company there. You guys made that happen.

I included the image of the Nerf dart next to the Jolt EX-1 in the above picture so you can see the size of this new gun. It's tiny. It fits in your hand, it's easy to conceal, and you can whip it out quickly and shoot someone in the face with it. I would not suggest doing so in a social situation unless you are much larger than the victim. This is why I chose, once again, to test the gun on my children.

The surprising thing about the gun, which sells for around under $10, is that it's powerful.

Sonic CD was originally released on the ill-fated Sega CD platform, and it proved to be one of the few truly good games for that system. That's right, it was a game, not an experiment in what could be done with video. Sonic CD introduced Amy Rose and Metal Sonic, and it's worth noting that this happened before gamers began to groan at the idea of characters that aren't Sonic. The game was also released on the PC back in 1996; later, it could be found on the PlayStation 2 and GameCube in the Sonic Gems collection. It was always a game that people enjoyed, but it was never all that easy to find. Until now.

Sonic CD has been released on the Xbox Live Arcade, with a PlayStation Network version coming on December 20. The game can also be found on iOS devices tomorrow, and on the Android store starting today. We're going to stick to the Xbox 360 version, because we like buttons and the PlayStation 3 version is a week away. So how well does the game hold up?

The Humble Bundles are now something of an institution. Indie games are bundled up, released on a cross-platform basis, and sold for whatever price you're willing to pay. None of the games are shackled by DRM, the customer support usually comes from the developers themselves, and the response from gamers has been amazing: the latest bundle has been up for around a day and has already taken in over $1 million, with over 190,000 bundles sold. That's not surprising, as the games included in the Humble Bundle 4 are universally amazing, including Super Meat Boy, Jamestown, and Shank, among others.

We talked to Richard Esguerra, whose job title is listed as "Bundle Advocate," to talk about how this latest bundle was put together, and how the ideas behind the Humble Bundles are growing.

The world of Gears of War 3 has been broadened with the release of RAAM's Shadow, a $15 chunk that adds a few pieces of content to the game as well as a lengthy new piece of single-player content. Well, I should say "campaign" instead of single-player, since you can play through the whole thing in co-op as well as by yourself. Like everything else in the Gears series, it's better when you bring a friend.

What's interesting about the content is how much depth it adds to the world of Gears of War. It also fills in some gaps that show what Sera was like before Emergence Day, when the Locust poured from the ground and a war broke out that all but destroyed the planet.

Sony removed the ability to use the "Other OS" feature of the PlayStation 3 through a firmware update last year, and this made a small—but vocal—group of gamers very upset. A judge has thrown out a class-action lawsuit trying to hold Sony accountable for these actions, stating that the legal case has not been made proving why Sony is in violation of its agreements with consumers.

"The dismay and frustration at least some PS3 owners likely experienced when Sony made the decision to limit access to the PSN service to those who were [un]willing to disable the Other OS feature on their machines was no doubt genuine and understandable," Judge Seeborg wrote. "As a matter of providing customer satisfaction and building loyalty, it may have been questionable."  

The problem is that the plaintiffs could not prove that they were entitled to an ongoing relationship with Sony after the date of purchase, and they had the option of turning down the update and continuing their use of their Linux installations. "As a legal matter... plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable," Judge Seeborg wrote.

This has to be comforting to Sony, which is now protected against class-action lawsuits by a clause in the PlayStation 3 terms of service that removes consumers' right to sue and take part in class-action suits altogether. Gamers could opt out, but with the requirement of a physical letter being mailed, it's doubtful large numbers took the time and effort.

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