I was going to write a review of Spore, but this is pretty much what I'd say:

Linky

(Apart from that I didn't find being a herbivore any harder than being a carnivore)

It's pretty obvious Neversoft completely failed to understand what's fun about the Guitar Hero games, or they'd neither have added the stupid Boss Battles nor shoe-horned in the painfully cliched “sold your soul to the devil” plot.

Least they managed to avoid fucking the rest of the game up.

And where're the decent downloads. Why can't I play any song from any guitar hero?

“Talking at Nottingham's Game City event earlier today, Frontier Development's David Braben dropped a handful of tantalising new hints about his latest project, The Outsider. What's more, the co-creator of seminal space-trading sim, Elite, also confirmed that Elite IV is pencilled in for release on current generation gaming hardware, following its announcement in, er, 2001.”

IGN: Braben reveals more on The Outsider, Elite IV

Forza 2 is quite fun. Kind of throws a few too many cars at you at the start though - am I supposed to sell them or race them? And if sell them who would buy them since I assume everyone gets a bundle of the crappy ones at the start.

Thanks to Bri for the nifty car though...



That design must've taken a lot of work.

I was all jazzed-up for the new version of Trackmania (trailer below) until I saw this on the Steam page for it:



Given Starforce's history, I think I'll pass.

Ron 'Monkey Island' Gilbert is starting a WoW guild...

“I'm starting a Horde aligned Guild on the Server Quel'dorei called Threepwood and any WoW players looking for a Money Island Themed Guild are more then welcome to join me. My one criteria is that you have to be playing a character named after someone in Monkey Island.”

Grumpy Gamer

Marvel and Cryptic, purveyors both of high-gloss underwear pervert entertainment have buried the hatchet and are now talking Marvel Universe Online.

What's interesting is they seem to be talking at cross-porpoises. Here's Mighty Marvelite Ames Kirshen:

“World of Warcraft is a success because of accessibility to the user. It's a pick up and play MMO, same with City of Heroes. Having tried Final Fantasy XI and EverQuest, it was easier to jump in [to CoH or WoW] and customize your character and play.”

So... basically, simple = a winnar.

Meanwhile, over at Cryptic, Jack “Emmett” Emmett goes for the gameplay:

“In CoH it was a goal that the game had to be fun to play. But what CoH didn't engage in, that a game like WoW does, is an economy system. Playing the auction house in WoW is a game in and of itself, how does that interpret and how does that translate to the Marvel universe? We've got to figure that out.”

Which sounds suspiciously like, “boy did we screw the pooch by leaving out all the fun complexity WoW has”.

Maybe they're just hoping talking about how cool WoW is will cause its success to rub off on them. But I think they're missing what really made WoW the 6 million subscriber success it is: Blizzard's long history of good multiplayer games that resulted in a large fanbase that plays online games. Oh, and Elf pr0n.