Sorry for the lack of update yesterday. Reality, among other things decided to make an appearance. By the time I was able to free myself up, I had nothing on my mind that was desperate to be on a page. Maybe next time I will just start writing and see what happens. That is how some of my more colorful creations are born.

Casual games and the affect they have on gaming in general has been debated almost to death. I always felt like I was outside the debate to a certain extent. For one thing there is only video games in my world view. They only fall in to two category’s, ones I want to play and ones I don’t. So the whole notion of the hardcore and casual always seemed silly to me. Recently it has come to my attention how taken my mother and aunt are with Facebook games. That wasn’t to surprising as both of them love games in general. Making the leap from playing board games etc, to Facebook games isn’t that big. My sister on the other hand is not a game player. She never had any patience for Sorry, Monopoly or Hungry Hungry Hippos when we were kids. So it was a little shocking when she asked me where she could purchase a Wii the other day. After all these years, Wii sports and Wii resort had awoken some dormant need to play video games. To me that is why the Wii is important. I doubt she’ll ever be rocking rounds of Halo and screaming at noobs. Yet she now has a desire to play video games. Whether the dorkcore want to admit or not, that is a good thing for all gamers.

Apparently E3 has changed the rules again. They have now made it even harder for people to get press credentials. This of course has caused a very entertaining uproar. A lot of it spilled over into my twitter feed and it was hilarious. Look the group behind E3 changed it’s rules and there is nothing you can do about it. Part of the problem is how easy E3 was to get in to in the early years. It became almost like a geek pilgrimage and then the game got changed. There also appears to be a lot of folks out there that think they are gaming press. Simply because they threw together a blog and have a few thousand pages views. Again that scam worked in the early days, (hi Destructoid) it just ain’t going to fly now. I think a lot of the irrational outrage stems from the fact that people have convinced themselves they are gaming press. The folks at E3 tend to see it differently and that has wrecked a few egos. Luckily, I am just an asshole with a blog and a PC. I will watch it from the comfort of my office just like I did last year. Entertained by my twitter feed and comforted by my awesome desk chair. Beats running all over a convention hall all day.

The crew over at wearearcade has some interesting news this morning. There is a rumor floating around that Bungie’s next game will be an FPS MMO. You can find the story at other sites, I felt like giving wearearcade the link love. My first thought is that Bungie can make a good FPS MMO and make it work. My second thought was oh fuck they work for Activision now. Please not a COD MMO, anything but that. Calm down, that thought isn’t so much hate for COD, as it is love for Bungie. I would rather see them get their own IP to create. Hell, how many more developers does COD need at this point? Okay got that out of my system, lets get back to the thought of an FPS MMO. As I said, Bungie is capable of creating an excellent one. My concern then becomes can it find space in the market? Will Halo fans show the love for the developer or is their love only for the Halo franchise? The one bright spot I see, is this MMO will be an alternative to WOW. It wouldn’t be a direct competitor and that may help. I will be keeping tabs on this rumor and see what develops.