Well, and your Dad too! Newsweek has a new story about an old subject. No pun intended. Nintendo is definitly not just interested in the kiddies anymore. With games like PD and Conker's BFD, Nintendo is looking to tackle the adults as well. Thank god! I think this concept will help attract the older gaming demographic back to Nintendo.

Here's more proof that videogames aren't just for kids anymore. In a new TV ad, a young woman gets out of bed, clutching silk sheets to her clearly nude body. She walks through her high-tech apartment to take a shower behind a smoked glass door, letting out a hushed erotic sigh as the water cascades over her. Afterward, she carefully applies her lipstick, then eases her model-thin frame into black panties and a matching sports bra. You might think you're watching a lingerie commercial... until a secret compartment in the back of her walk-in closet opens up to reveal guns. Lots of guns. And as she proceeds to accessorize her latex-'n'-leather ensemble with enough firepower to wipe out Sierra Leone, it's clear that the videogame industry may have created a brand-new superstar in special agent Joanna Dark.

In the age of perky pixilated Playmates like Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, a game such as Perfect Dark shouldn't come as a surprise. What is surprising is that this comes from Nintendo, whose family-friendly reputation has made the company the Disney of videogames. Perfect Dark is rated M for Mature —the electronic entertainment industry's equivalent of an R rating —so it's as if Disney released "Pulp Fiction" under the Disney name instead of its edgier Miramax banner. The game comes out at a time when members of Congress and state attorneys general are persuading retailers like Sears and Montgomery Ward to stop selling Mature titles. And given that the original game, based on the James Bond flick "Goldeneye," sold $4.5 billion worth of copies with a T for Teen rating, why would Nintendo risk its pristine image to release an M-rated sequel in Perfect Dark?

One reason is the changing demographics of videogame players: they're getting older. According to the Interactive Digital Software Association, 58 percent of the people who play console videogames are over 18 (bonus shocking stat: 21 percent are 35 or older). A lot of that is due to the runaway success of Sony's PlayStation, which is credited with attracting older gamers with franchises like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. Nintendo might have a hammerlock on the children's market with titles like Pokemon, but it knows it's not going to beat Sony without the adult audience. "The kids who fell in love with Mario when they were 6, they're now 26," says Nintendo of America's marketing director Perrin Kaplan. "Given Nintendo's ability to create such wonderful pieces of work, we think we can do the same for younger kids and for adults."

And as far as videogames go, Perfect Dark is in a league of its own. Created by a Nintendo-exclusive game-design outfit called Rare, it's a first-person shooter in the mold of Doom and Quake with an espionage-inspired storyline that rewards brains over bullets. Yet as much fun as the single-player version may be, the multiplayer version truly shines. Instead of difficulty settings like Easy, Medium and Hard, the computer-controlled opponents (called simulants) have personalities: the RevengeSim hunts down the last person who killed him; the PeaceSim tries to collect the weapons so that other players can't get them; the FeudSim stalks a single player for the duration of the match. The countless little details —when an opponent hits you, the screen blurs for several seconds to indicate your wooziness —showcases an appetite for perfection that's almost unmatched in the game industry.

In fact, Perfect Dark is such an adrenaline-laced thrill ride, it's a bit of a jolt to meet the shy wizards behind Rare's curtain. Founded in Britain in 1983 by brothers Chris and Tim Stamper, the company developed such a reputation for top-notch titles that Nintendo acquired a quarter of the company, making it an exclusive developer and the first non-Japanese game company that Nintendo invested in. The relationship between the two became so close that Rare was entrusted with some of Nintendo's most fabled franchises, like Donkey Kong, while coming up with its own successful properties such as Banjo-Kazooie and Killer Instinct. And even when the games aren't finished on time —Goldeneye came out a year after the movie —Nintendo gives them the time and money to get it right. "It's about associating with a partner who understands that it's all about quality," Chris Stamper says. "We're a games company, and that's what we love to do."

Some in the industry, however, feel that Nintendo and Rare are making a mistake with their more adult-themed games. "It was a mistake, and I told them that," says Bruno Bonnell, the outspoken CEO of the French game publisher Infogrames. "Nintendo is the light balancing the darkness of teenage games." Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan, who persuaded Sears and Mongomery Ward to stop selling M-rated games after his office found that 13- to 15-year-olds could buy them despite the rating, says he wishes that Nintendo wasn't joining the crowd. "These games push the wrong buttons," he says. "They reward children for violence." But Nintendo, which has been remarkably forthright about its entry into the mature space, has also taken great pains to advertise the game only to the appropriate age group. The movie trailer runs before R-rated films, the TV spots air after 10 p.m. and the print ads are running in magazines like GQ and Maxim. Even the Perfect Dark Web site (perfectdark.com) has a prominent link aimed at parents, explaining that the game contains "realistic first person shooting action that may be too intense for younger game players."

Attorneys general and congressmen aside, Nintendo plans to keep going after older gamers. It has added Silicon Knights, a Canadian outfit, to its stable of exclusive game developers. And Rare intends to pursue the "South Park" generation later this year with Conker's Bad Fur Day, a raunchy, wittily profane title that spoofs everything from "Saving Private Ryan" to "Godzilla." In one scene, a door tells our heroic squirrel to "F —k off!" (It's bleeped, but you can tell what's being said, which prompted an exasperated Bonnell to say, "What is [that word] doing in a Nintendo game?") In another scene, the fur ball has to get drunk on a keg of beer, then use his urine to extinguish the flaming flatulence of his foes. "When people grow up on games, they don't stop playing," says Stamper. "There aren't games for people who grew up on the early systems." Old souls may recoil, but for the people who loved "There's Something About Mary" and "American Pie," Nintendo's dark new turn might just come at the perfect time.