E3 is here. And so forth…

I love E3. I hate not being at E3.

I love reading news on E3. I hate blogging about E3.

I hate blogging about E3 because I feel like there is little that I can contribute towards the E3 zeitgeist. Maybe that is my own lack of confidence in my ability to write something interesting when every other blog seems to sum up my feelings on various E3 happenings pretty well.

Hmm. I dunno. If I were actually at E3, then perhaps I’d feel like I had something more to contribute.

Which makes me want to be at E3 that much more.

Anywho, this week is E3. Let’s see what happens.

Carnival of Gamers! Wiiiii!

Sorry… bad pun… I’ll apologize for that, right now.

In any event, the latest Carnival of Gamers is up. I just read the notification in Bloglines, so I haven’t read any of the articles. Looks like a lot of good stuff though. I can’t wait to dig in…

In other news…

EA’s stock took a nose dive, when they announced fiscal Q4 losses. I wonder when they’ll start firing people again.

007: License to Suck

I want to touch on two things here. First, I think the new Bond looks like a drug addict. Second, I think the news that EA has dropped the Bond game license is really good news. Activision will be picking up the license, now. That in and of itself isn’t super great news. Activision hasn’t really proven itself capable of doing well with certain licenses, case in point: Star Trek. What I think is really outstanding is that EA seems to be actually following through on this whole reinvention phase they’re going through. They really meant it when they said they were going to rely less on licensed properties, like Bond and Lord of the Rings, and release more unique games.

In the same article is news about the upcoming Superman Returns game from EA.

Meanwhile, Warner Brothers and EA have delayed the Superman Returns game from the theatrical release date in June to the DVD release this fall. The film is slated to open June 30.

I like this returning trend of delaying games until they’re better. It used to be this was the norm in the indutry, until all the heavy hitters were more concerned with getting a game out before a certain date, than whether the game was finished, case in point: Knights of the Old Republic II. Now, we’ve seen this happen with Heroes of Might and Magic V and a few other titles from Ubisoft. A game that has really shown some benefit from this practice is Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for Xbox 360. The Xbox version was craptastic, but the 360 version was delayed from its original status as a 360 launch title and has now become one of the platform’s strongest offerings in the FPS genre. It is easily good enough and fun enough to hold everyone over until Halo 3 comes out.

Anyway, the general trend seems to be that more of the high profile games are becoming much better in terms of overall quality. Yay!

My Bloglines widget

I have created a simple WordPress widget to display my own Bloglines subscriptions. Feel free to download it and use it on your own blog. It has a simple configuration form so that you can set the widget title and enter your Bloglines username.

If you aren’t familiar with WordPress or Widgets, WordPress is the content management software I use to display all of our wonderful weblog posts. A widget is a kind of “plugin-within-a-plugin” that allows me to quickly customize the content of my sidebar.

Download: My Bloglines widget

Also, if anyone has any bugs and/or feedback about this widget, please send me some email at finster [at] gmail [dot] com and please include “Bloglines Widget” in the subject.