Good morning, afternoon, evening or whenever you're reading this. I am now officially enrolled as an A2 student at my college and although there are some aspects of college it'll be cool to get back to, I don't think anybody really wants to go back. But it's been a long week and a good week, I now have my late birthday present, an awesome laptop that my parents paid for. It's wi-fi ready, has a dual core processor (1.8 GHz), 2046 MB RAM, a 160 GB hard-drive and a NVIDIA GeForce 8400 graphics card, I can't tell you how much I love it.

With the graphics card on this thing I've got Spore Creature Creator running and even though I have a limited selection of parts and it's only one component of the full game, the possibility in this thing seems near endless and I feel that it's so accessible that almost no one can build a bad creature, but that there are so many options available that more proficient visionaries should be satisfied with it. Considering it was effectively free, the game has been a great taste of Spore and I love everything I've been able to make.

However, I've been rooting around the internet and the actual reality of Spore seems to have come out a little different from what the vision was. I've heard that the game has various problems from the dumbing-down of the main gameplay to annoying but idiotic AI. It still looks so weigh up as a great game, but I find this news disheartening given the time that has been put into making the game and the brilliant vision that Will Wright originally had. Maxis haven't been known for patching their creations in the past and I don't expect Spore to be any different, however I wouldn't be surprised to see expansions in the future but who knows if EA will ever publish anything that will not only add new content but address existing issues. None the less I am still going to pick up the game (today hopefully) and I'm still very excited.

Finally I wish I could have been at PAX last week, the event looked really great and the music, Giant Bomb panel and podcast and the Bungie-related fun looked really sweet. So this week I'm going to leave you with this video of Jonathan Coulton (writer of comedy songs, including Still Alive) and Felicia Day (creator and main character in The Guild) performing Still Alive live. Hope you had a great summer everyone.

-Gamer_152