A summary of the week: Brawl delayed, gaming sales figures outstanding, news interesting, games great, internet idiots plentiful, Navaro leaving. Me personally? Well I've been playing a little Guitar Hero III (still can't do hard but i'll keep practicing) and I've also been playing Halo 3 (Lieutenant Grade 2). I haven't got round to continuing The Simpsons Game because there are frankly better games for me to play at the moment... and my bro is always on the Xbox these days but I will get round to it eventually! I've also been playing Assassin's Creed (if you haven't seen the game it's like Spiderman with pointed weapons) and i'm, enjoying it immensely, perhaps more so than some because the kinda of adventure game I like is usually filled with puzzles (like Zelda) instead of raw combat but whatever way you look at it the game is great, i'm aware it's going to end on a lousy cliffhanger though which even at this point is a little dissapointing considering the story isn't that bad. I've also just started Bioshock and replaying Advance Was: Dual Strike and they're good to. I'm still hyped for Dark Conflict (it's what they're calling Days of Ruin in Europe for some reason).

Anyway I've gone on far too long about myself, let me start on some of the weeks event with something I need to talk about first before I can really say anything else. We saw the likes of Greg Kasavin, Rich Gallup and then Jeff Gerstmann leave Gamespot in one way or another but at least we still had the intelligent, game loving, humourous friend of Jeff, Alex Navaro around to bring a little character to the shows and reviews. Not any more, just like Jeff there's no "official" word yet but the news was announced on one of the minor gaming sites (although he has more recently posted about it in his blog). It's important to say if you haven't read the article that Navarro is leaving by choice but his departure is somewhat connected with the Gerstmann-gate crisis. This is horrible, we're losing another excellent Gamespot editor who had so much to bring to the site but because of CNETs decision to fire Jeff in the first place, it's come back to bite them in the ass but it's much worse for us and the Gamespot staff than it is for CNET. I personally have taken this opportunity after considering it so many times to terminate my Gamespot Total Access subscription. I'm not saying it's forever but i'll reactivate it when I feel it'll really be worth it. If you're looking to read more on the whole thing check out Laughlyn's editorial.

I'd continue on a lighter note but sadly there's more bad news to come. The eagerly awaited Wii title Super Smash Bros. Brawl has been delayed again. I think any of you that have ever been on the forums know what kind of fan base Super Smash Bros. has but it's just one delay after another. Nintendo knew it was going to happen and they did admit you could probably work it out by looking at the updates on their site and comparing them to the release date but this doesn't help when not too many months ago I thought me and thousands of others would be playing Brawl right now. Still, it makes you wonder, would we of been happier if they'd announced one date really far off in the distance instead of letting us take it a few months at a time? On the plus side I suppose it did get a perfect score fom Japan's top gaming mag and that does make it seem a little more worth the wait. The joy the announcement of the various Pikmin updates brought me also made me realise I have an unhealthy obsession with our little multicouloured friends but all the updates seem pretty original none the less.

The gaming figures for the U.S in 2007 are also now in and they're unbelievable. You can read them for yourself, but gaming sales up 43%? Now that's impressive. It was also interesting to see how Nintendo didn't quite dominate the market as much as I thought they would, especially with the surge in PS3 sales. In fact from an industry point of view December may be the most interesting month of 2007. Unfortunately another case of "video-game-related" killing has occurred and I think as games become more popular this is only going to get worse and worse and it's really nasty stuff. Ironically in the other side of the news we have surgeons using the Wii to help train their hand for careful operation, although i'd like to say for the record that I don't think their entire training consists of sitting around playing the Wii all day.

Thanks to everyone who actually survived another of my lengthy posts and I'll leave you with a few things, firstly this brilliant video game crossword by U1, what happens when a man who has never played Mass Effect decides to do a full page rant about it (WARNING: contains explicit sex references) and an article by GabuEx hilarious for other reasons.