There’s a war raging over at Amazon right now as a loosely organized group of frustrated users are using the Amazon rating system as a way to voice their deep disappointment with the DRM that’s being used on Spore.
If you haven’t been following along, the “copy protection” that was implemented on the product doesn’t allow more than one user to play the game, and won’t let you install the game more than three times before you have to start calling up EA and asking for permission to reinstall …

I was a big fan of the first Mercenaries game. Although there had been a few previous attempts to use and recreate the mission-driven, vehicle oriented, “Sandbox” style gameplay of GTA3, Mercenaries was one of the first to successfully transplant it into a radically different genre. It was a logical leap, but by turning GTA’s metaphorical urban war-zone into a literal one, it gave the player a wider variety of (mostly military) toys to play with, along with bigger targets to blow up. And instead of your amoral actions …

Laurie Anderson once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
While that’s a clever analogy, it’s also not quite as deep as it sounds. Music is, after all, a written, linear experience. It has lyrics, and occurs in the same exact sequence every time we experience it. Words alone may not capture the experience directly, but there’s a sort of purification that happens as you describe one experience in another medium that can make it effective in communicating our thoughts to someone else. And if all we talked …

The speech at Penny Arcade Expo ended up being full to overflowing, and it turns out that Gamers weren’t the only people in attendance. There was some press as well.
One might not expect the producer and designer of the original Petz to attract a big crowd at the hardcore gaming celebration that is the Penny Arcade Expo. However, Andrew Mayer’s “You Don’t Know What You Really Want” panel attracted an overflowing crowd to the “Wolfman Theatre,” with additional attendees waiting outside hoping to fill any seats vacated mid-presentation.

Thanks so much …

I’ll be busy telling gamers why “You Don’t Know What you Really Want: Why Game Players Don’t Understand What They Really Like About Video Games.”
Here’s the details:
Think you could make your favorite game better? Think you have an idea that could break the industry wide open? Think again!
Andrew Mayer, a game designer with numerous top selling titles, and fifteen years in the industry, shows you why what you think you want out of video games often isn’t what you really want at all, and how things that frustrate a player …