For my birthday a couple weeks ago, Adam surprised me with a brand new PlayStation 3. Whilst browsing things on it, I recalled a title I heard about months ago which seemed interesting: Flower, an ambient/atmospheric game available for purchase on the PlayStation Store that has you taking control of the wind, ushering seeds and flower petals around in a beautifully rendered landscape. Having seen videos of the game on YouTube and hearing rave reviews from friends, the game seemed intriguing and I eagerly added cash to my account to buy it. What has happened next has really annoyed the hell out of me.

Video games based on movies are often a disappointing affair, on par with movies based on video games or movies based on almost every book. The mediums themselves are so disparate with such stark divisions between them that finding a common method of telling the same story often leads to failure– movies are presentations where we're a spectator, watching as things flow past; games are inherently interactive to a necessary degree, and a game that divorced itself from this interactivity would be as absurd as a movie that expected the audience to control where the film goes. The problem is that so often, attempts to bridge the gap between these constructs fall flat, less an emulation and more like a sad copy.

Last week Ars Technica ran an interesting article discussing ways that PC gamers can make their voices heard to game studios when they're upset about decisions those studios have made. I'm not sure why they narrowed in specifically on PC gamers, since I think their advice would work equally well with respect to console releases or even customer/company interactions that have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever. Perhaps it's because the majority of what they touched on was regarding anonymity within internet communities that led them to keep their focus on PC players– I'm not sure.

NaNoWriMo has been an event that has intrigued me for a few years now. I've often thought of doing it but never actually committed the "thinking" into "doing," despite seeing it crop up every year in my friends' status updates on various social networking services. I admit to a certain level of elitism preventing me from getting involved, as well: NaNoWriMo has always seemed like an interesting idea, but in practice I always come off feeling that it's the sort of deal bored housewives do to make themselves seem more interesting– "I'm a novelist," etc. No, dear, you watch Oprah.

After various amounts of work adjusting the layout and getting everything migrated I'm quite excited to announce the opening of ctrlclick.com, the new home of what used to be joshuameadows.com. As I've mentioned here a few times I no longer feel the content I write about here is quite appropriate to be housed under an address so specific and personal to myself, so I think that it is better kept in this new location.

Blizzard sits at the apex of a legacy that few companies in the game industry share in; creators of not one but three influential franchises, they are also responsible for the defacto MMOG. Whether you love it or hate it it's hard to deny the impact World of Warcraft has had. World of Warcraft has just celebrated its 5th anniversary but more than that, the Warcraft franchise itself has reached the 15 year milestone.

In a period of time to be determined (either immediately or sometime in the next few days, depending on free time and motivation), this site will be transitioning from its current domain to ctrlclick.com. I have a lot of reasons for wanting to do this; I feel that a domain name based around someone's real name probably should be full of personalized content, and that's not really been the focal point of my writing here for quite some time, so I don't feel that it's all that fitting any longer.