Victory! I played through nearly a dozen Wipeout HD tracks last night without being pitched home insurance! Sony has performed a State Farm-ectomy on Wipeout HD, removing the annoying ads that extended the loading time for tracks. This is a best case scenario of what happens when enough people kvetch. With the combined efforts of gamers, bloggers, and a couple of incontrovertible YouTube videos, we won.

Let this be a lesson that you don't have to take it when game companies abuse your trust. Tacky ingame advertising is just one issue. There are issues of tasteless marketing (EA and Dante's Inferno), questionable microtransactions (the upcoming Champions MMO), sloppy releases (ArmA II), flat-out busted launches (Fat Princess' multiplayer), and so on. We gripe because we love. And sometimes it works.

The real winner here is Wipeout HD, which gets to return to its own neon world of fake advertising without some dippy State Farm ad playing it over. How good is it now? I'll tell you tomorrow.