This past week an article from ClickZ got some love for its extreme take on the state of the industry. Which was of course that consoles are going to die to the masses of newer, younger casual games. Of course, the author of the ClickZ article didn’t actually qualify any of his opinions with numbers. I mean, it’s obvious that casual games are going to eat consoles alive, right?

Big news this week —news that is going to ripple well beyond gaming. Starting Nov. 19, in concert with the launch of the new Xbox 360 Dashboard, the console is going to be able to stream video from Netflix,in HD.

The PS3 thus far hasn’t had incredible luck with securing exclusive titles — aside from “Metal Gear Solid 4,” the platform’s exclusives haven’t been the huge sellers that games like “Halo 3″ and “Gears of War” have been for the Xbox 360. This month, however, Sony was scheduled to release what was (and still is, in all likelihood) shaping up to be a major hit — “Little Big Planet.”

“Fable II” is set to launch this coming week — it is a highly anticipated console title from UK game studios Lionhead, a sequel to a fantasy-based game for the original Xbox. The game promises dynamic alteration to the character and game world based on user behavior. Oh, and this post has very little to do with the game itself. In fact, the game is besides the point. What’s been very interesting are the marketing efforts surrounding the game, and how those tie together with the title. There is some serious ground being broken here.

Last week Forbes published an article declaiming that video game publishers are shifting their attention to the casual game market, stating that the bulk of growth is coming in the casual sector — a major reversal from just two months ago, when the mag declared a “Casual Gold Bust,” saying that the casual games market was so flooded, developers were having difficulty carving out a niche there. The article’s thesis revolves around “Spore,” the recently released god game that allows you to shepherd an alien race from single-celldom to galactic empire.

It’s been an interesting week for casual gaming. One of the items that got a lot of press was the announcement that a PopCap sponsored add-on for World of Warcraft would allow players to play Bejeweled during their in-game downtime. This was a neat story: A corporation bringing rogue IP back into its fold in a symbiotic manner. A nice alternative to the Scrabalicious route.

It’s a fairly well-established trend in the gaming industry that movie tie-in titles tend towards mediocrity. With a few notable exceptions (”Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay,” the LotR brawler series, and a few others), most games developed in tandem with movies are half-baked, poorly conceived, and generally pretty bad. But if games made from movies tend towards mediocrity, the reverse — movies made from games — often end up as abominations of cinema, enjoyable only to the extent that they’re laughable.

The big news this week has been the insanity surrounding EA’s recent release “Spore,” and the blowback to the included draconian SecuROM DRM protection that shipped with it. There are more than 2,000 one-star reviews on Amazon.com lambasting the game’s restrictive protections, and many comments have legitimate points.

In my last column, I mentioned in passing “Sins of a Solar Empire,” a title that has become a financial success while selling discs and digital copies without any form of copy protection. This week, publisher Stardock revealed exactly how much of a success — 500,000 units, with 100,000 of those sales coming from digital distribution. While that’s not exactly up to par with “GTA IV’”s 10 million units sold since release, for an independent, non-franchise game with a budget of only $1,000,000, it’s practically a runaway hit.

When I was in first grade, I thought that war should really be settled by board game. So it comes as a welcome surprise to see that the rappers Bow Wow and The Game have decided to challenge each other not to a quickdraw, but to a game of “Madden ‘09.” The stakes? $100k, to be donated by the loser to charity.