Totalspore mentions an oficial release date for the much anticipated real-turned-vaporware-turned-real evolution sim Spore.

Amazon does indeed list the title as a preorder, with a release date set in March 2008. Play.com also indicates March as the release date, still, there hasn't been any form of confirmation from EA, although "March, April, May of next year" was the timeframe the EA CEO had previously mentioned.

Rejoice?

....because there's more to life than writing long winded, serious posts.

(the embeding doesn't seem to work for me, so, grab the link here instead...)

MaxVest made a point in his cblog about racism in the gaming community..

This, along with another cblog incident (A Mexican user getting pissy at dtoid and an ensuing flood of childish "racist, only funny" idiocy) just a few days ago, led to this reply, which grew kinda big, so I decided to make God change his mind about me sucking and turn it into a blog post instead... so here goes...

Other than Angelsdontburn's "No, just retarded" fact in comment, which is true for a percentage of members in any community, gamers not excluded, I think that it's mostly a bad side-effect of the Net's power of anonymity and distance to kids that still don't grasp how society works.

So, when a kid doesn't get its ass kicked IRL for calling another kid a [insert racial (and sexual, and...) expletives here], but instead does it from the safety of his home on XBL, he's never gonna figure out the repercussions inherent in being a racist dick, ie. said deserved ass-kicking.

This quickly leads to more and more similar behavior, most often to sound as tough as that other guy in the chat room, and in the end you get a very very blurred line between humor and actual racism..

Personally, being white in a country that's barely as multicultural as the US or the UK, I don't really see the problem very often. Add the fact that I do most of my MP gaming in netcafes cause I prefer the closeness of LANs, and you can see that I'm not really all that affected by said "racism" than say, a man of any minority in the US playing Halo 2 in XBL.

Maybe it's because of lack of said exposure that even in a LAN event in a big netcafe, I'll make sure that a 12 year old kid calling me a cheating bitch for fragging his clueless ass gets a scare to remember at the very least. Yeah, it's SRS BSNS alright.

Call me old fashioned if you will, but I'm somewhat concerned about a generation of gamers and netizens growing up without learning the simple fact of life that what goes around comes around, specially when it's about being a total fucktard.

Of course, the issue of parenting plays a great part here too, as long as kids are concerned at least.. And when you let the TV or the PS3 babysit your kid, shit like that is bound to happen. But that's another long (longer, actually) topic, so we'll end the thing here..

So, over-reacting much? Not nearly enough? Do we strangle the dissing 12 year olds by their headsets, or do we go the effortless verbal abuse way? Everyone's doing it, amIrite?

..well, you see, it cannot be escaped.

No, not really.

Looking back, I guess it was just natural that I ended up here.. Yes, all the dots connect in my mind, slowly but steadily, forming a big square shape with two ominous circles gazing straight into my soul and a T-like forehead.

It was the Atari, I think. When your father gets you a 512 ST for your fifth birthday, you know things are gonna just end up like this. Or maybe the fact that I learnt how to copy diskettes by overwritting my Logo and Basic floppies with extra copies of Bubble Bobble and Another World. Heh, it just makes sense now.

Castlevania on my cousins' NES. The first cartridge I'd blown in exasperation, only to be rewarded by the red-white logo. Black and green logo, maybe? To skate, I'd have to dodge the local park's junkies like a new Tony Hawk. So I had Skate or Die in my Gameboy, jumping criminals with my 'board whenever I wasn't saving Princess or thinking of how to best Pajitnov's creation along the rhythym of Russian folk music.

Then came the SNES, and I still can't forget the tape with the Donkey Kong music I carried around in my Walkman for I don't know how long (although that was nothing compared to recording a flawless run of Another World in VHS, showing off both the kickass story of the Delphine game and my uber gaming skillz.)

Yes, I'm certain there was no other way. I mean, I was pretty certain back then, when I had blasted through Wolf3D, when I had shivered at the sight and sound of the crucified Quake Zombies, right in the initial skill level chambers.. when I played Crusader: No Remorse..

My first strategy guide for Diablo 2, along with the obligatory comments from my mother who didn't get what all that Devil stuff was all about back then..

Shit, it's been sixteen years and some since I touched my first Quickshot, the reassuring click of the red plastic trigger still in my mind. Had I known what pushing that button would lead to..

...I would have done it all over again.

Hello, my name is George, and I'm a Gamer.