With the impending release of Windows 7, tech news media has stepped up the common refrain that somehow Vista was a "failed" operating system. While the OS certainly had a rocky launch, is its negative perception today really accurate or the result of misunderstandings and incorrect representations?

The latest compilation project from OverClocked ReMix is Humans + Gears and re-envisions Yasunori Mitsuda's opus from Xenogears. Started in 2006, Humans + Gears is a two disc, 33-track album featuring submissions from thirty different artists. The scope of the album is split into two halves; Human is softer and more acoustic while Gears is more electronic and mechanical. Having gone through the entire two discs earlier I was blown away by the impressiveness of many of the songs– while they all have their roots in a video game soundtrack, so many of the arrangements completely stand on their own legs without seeming like someone ran a MIDI through Reason.

Attaching special bonuses to an upcoming release, serving as a magical enticement to get you to fork over cash before a title comes out, is not a new practice– nor is it reserved to the gaming industry. I'm personally well familiar with receiving all sorts of solicitations for buying a CD before its release date, from bonus songs to videos to promo concert codes. With games, bonuses come specific to the retailer you're purchasing from too, with GameStop in particular usually running away with the lion's share of consumer "gifts."

Wherein one guy with a free weekend sets about using VirtualBox as a cross-platform, all-in-one webhost solution in order to do local website development whether connected to the internet or not. Warning: nerd content within.

As I have mentioned before, this site used to be part of extensive archives going back to 2000. Although largely I'm happy with my decision to excise the old archives, from time to time I lament the removal of some entries that I've written in the past which I particularly enjoyed.

While MMOGs originally started out as huge social experiences over time they were refined further and further into single player escapades that had multiplayer components thrown in here and there liberally, to the point that now the preferred method of progression is to just play the game alone. Most games these days heavily cater to that, requiring very little in the way of group activity as you level– you can get through the entirety of World of Warcraft, for example, solo, and any group quests or instance runs are completely optional. However, once you hit the level cap, the expectations of the game shift radically from solo-friendly to heavily dependent on raiding. For the solo player it's a startling change of perspective as the rug is pulled out underneath you, and for those players who don't want to raid the only content they have left comes down to recycling daily quests over and over, PvP arenas/battlegrounds, or chasing after vanity achievements.

Yesterday both Joystiq and Kotaku covered the release of a new academically-approved public survey soliciting opinions from LGBT and heterosexual gamers about what they look for in video games. The survey itself didn't impress me much, personally, but it's a good jumping-off point to examine the sort of outrage anything like this generates in heterosexual-dominated gaming circles.