Alright, I missed out on last week's fidget, but I blame that mostly on the fact that I took Friday off and didn't touch my PC pretty much the entire weekend. It was a much needed and helpful bit of rest. I gamed, I slept, I watched a lot of TV and generally did nothing productive. But now I'm back again with a weekly wrap-up of what I've been up to and my random thoughts.
What I've Been Playing
- Burnout Paradise
I finally got the Burnout License, and have roughly 90 more wins to go to hit the Burnout Elite level... I don't think I'll be bothering with that. - Audiosurf
Talk about a weird/quirky game. Take any mp3, feed it to the game and it will analyze it for beat, tempo etc. and setup a "track" to the music. You move a little space ship side to side and collect colored blocks. Groups of blocks clear and give you points. I'm terrible at it, but it's such a cool concept - No More Heroes
The game is just wacky. You play an assassin with a laser sword (ie.e lightsaber) and you are trying to climb the ranks to become the "#1 Assassin". You do side missions to earn money to buy your way into a ranked fight. It's a Wii game so you swing the remote to swing the sword etc. Great style, but a bit repetitive. I have to finish the game eventually so mittens can play it.
What I've Been Watching
- Babylon 5
Last week I finished Season 2 and I'm about half way through Season 3. For whatever reason, I had no interest in this show when it originally aired, but I'm loving it now! - Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles
Ok, so I want John to die a horrible death and bring on the apocalypse, but that's really only because I want the show to consist solely of Summer Glau and Lena Headey. So much hotness - Jericho
Ahh the show is back after CBS cut it off at the end of Season 1. Granted it's only for like 7 or 8 episodes then it's done for good... but still, it's better than nothing. I love the premise of the show, there are so many interesting things you can do with it.
Websites
JoeUser 2 is progressing very nicely. We've added the "More" list for recent articles and are continually improving Windows Live Writer compatibility and working to iron out the remaining kinks in the forums, and in the editor. We're making great progress.
The Political Machine website is also making great progress. We're getting ready to go into heavy-duty testing on the site to make sure everything is working just right before formally launching it. This week we did a bit of a visual change to make it easier to connect to the game by the same name.
I can't wait for the new site/community to be up and running. This election promises to be a very interesting one, with a lot of things to discuss/argue.
Contests
Contests are an odd thing on websites/communities. You'd think that offering a cool prize for relatively little effort would result in a lot of entries, but it doesn't seem to ever work that way. Right now, between our sites, we have 3 contests running for completely different items.
- Forum Smileys [link]
Our smiley set is old. Very old. So we're offering $50 in software to whoever designs the best set. More than a week later, and nothing entered yet. - Sins of a Solar Empire Video Contest [link]
Take a cool gameplay video, submit it to us, and if it's the best submitted it could be placed on the PC Gamer Demo Disc for June 2008, and a signed copy of Sins. How cool a prize is that? With just a few days left, no entries yet 
- WinCustomize Community Contest [link]
BX has organized a great skinning contest with a ton of prizes, but so far only a small handful of entries have been submitted. I hope it picks up more steam/attention soon. BX has put a ton of work into it.
Now, we have the GUI Champs coming up near the end of the year and we know that'll be huge this year, but I don't really get why these smaller, and much easier contests never take off like they should.
EA & Take 2
Electronic Arts last weekend publicized that it had made an attempt to buy Take 2 Interactive, one of their major competitors in the North American video game publishing arena. EA is known for it's usually low-quality releases, especially when it comes to their now-exclusive sports franchises.
EA's approach for years now was to simply buy out the competition. When they have to compete with a smaller, more agile dev/pub house, they often get beaten about the head with a shoe. So instead of actually stepping up their game and trying to turn out a higher quality product, they buy their competitor. Eventually there isn't any competition left, so they don't even have to try anymore. We've definitely seen this in the NFL/NCAA games in recent years.
Now EA is eyeing one of the largest publishers on the market, much like they were eyeing Ubisoft last year for takeover. Remove Take 2 from picture and suddenly things start looking very grim. EA is going for a monopoly position in the market, and that's definitely bad for the gamer. They're turning into the Walmart/Microsoft of gaming. Pretty soon they'll be the only option for high-budget titles.
If this buy-out goes through, it's going to be a rough few years for gaming... PC gaming especially.