Are you sick and tired of politicians trying to legislate video games even they they will spend many thousands of dollars fighting it in court and lose due to first amendment issues?  The only way we can help is not by threatening a certain lawyer we all know and love but by making our own voice heard.

The best way to do that is by signing up for Video Game Voters Network at http://www.videogamevoters.org/.  (Note: I'm not affiliated with this organization) They won't spam you with emails except asking you to email your congress person once in awhile if your particular state have pending video games law.

If you are a gamer concerned about people regulating our games (more here: http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/) then you should definately help out by signing up at Video Game Voters Network.  Imagine what we can accomplish if we can get ten of millions of gamers all emailing our congressmen and women saying that they have better things to do than to regulate video games or we will just vote them out of office. 

My take from a retailer's perspective: There have been rumbling of changes to the current format for many years now. For those who aren't familiar with what a typical retailer's day at E3 is like, it goes something like this. Day 1, two hours meeting with Sony, two hours meeting with Microsoft, short lunch, two hours meeting with Nintendo, two hours meeting with EA. End of day. Day 2, 8 back to back one hour meetings with other publishers. Day 3, squeeze as many more meetings in as possible and hopefully leave yourself an hour or two to walk the floor.

There is no break in between meetings and definitely no time to get from one meeting to another. If you ended a meeting in south hall and have to walk to west hall for the start of your next meeting, you just have to walk fast and hope that there isn't too many milling gamers or celebrities blocking your path in the corridors. Couple that with the excessive noise that despite all of ESA's effort to curtail this year, meeting are held with publisher speaking loudly over the din and apologizing profusely for their neighbor's rock concert that may be going on next booth over. So, as a retailer, we saw this coming and are grateful that changes will be made next year to make our lives and job easier.

My take from a Gamer's perspective: I'm a gamer and for me, E3 is a blast. It great to see all the hype, the lights, the noise, the costumes, the outrageous big screens, the tournaments going on, the chatters of folks talking about their favorite games, the booth babes and of course all the cool games that are going to be out soon. As a gamer, I am disappointed that E3 will no longer be the awesome spectacle that it is anymore.

While I am disappointed, I will leave everybody with this. I'm hoping (praying really) that someone else, maybe Penny Arcade's PAX or even GameSpot can explore whether they can host something like an E3 and make it available to the public. How great would that be? Take what was E3 (a tradeshow for industry folk trying to get work done) and turn it into what it should be, a true for gamer's event with all the things we love about E3 as a gamer.

Wow, this game is huge but I finally beat it with a Warfare/Nature build.  This game ranked up there as one of my favorite and I will probably continue to play it, either with a new build or continuing onto Epic or Legendary difficulty.

I'm still crashing pretty often but I generally ignore them and continue on as this game is so fun.  If you like Diablo or Diablo 2, you must pick up this game.  Hopefully, we'll have a patch soon to fix some of the issues people are experiencing.