Our resident great white hope of game journalism, German hardcore gamer and Windows game collector Sicarius, just broke the 50,000 contribution points barrier.

His current main field of contribution seems to be the latest Windows games which he often adds shortly after release with detailed descriptions, a varied set of screen shots, and many other of the possible information. Furthermore, he obviously made close friends with the credits wizard, as he enters the most humongous of credit listings that only few would dare to touch.

Kudos to Christoph, and let's just hope that he continues trading the advantages of eating and sleeping for Moby contribution points. ;o)

February 3rd 2010 marks the release of Chime. The game is currently available on Xbox Live Arcade and can be bought for 400 Microsoft Points ($5). All proceeds go to charity foundations such as Save the Children and Starlight Children's Foundation.

Chime is the first of many games created pro bono by renowned developers and development companies for OneBigGame.

Chime is a music puzzle game that draws influence from Tetris. It features sampled music from famous musicians such as Philip Glass and Moby.

If you have an Xbox 360, check it out or try the demo. Play, so others can!

Our All-Time Top Female Contributor Jeanne has reached a new milestone - 60, 000 MobyGames contribution points. Jeanne has been with us for more than 8 years, and enriched the database with her fantastic contributions, primarily in the realm of adventure games. She leads MobyGames in contribution of game-related and developer-related websites, and is ranked second (behind the mighty Sciere) in many other contribution spheres. I would also like to use this opportunity to thank her for her extraordinary work as approver. Congratulations to Jeanne!

MobyYear 2010 opens with a very important addition to our genre structure: Visual Novel now exists as a sub-genre (Non-Sport Theme)!

This new sub-genre will allow users to easily browse through the vast ocean of (mainly) Japanese games which mainly consist of text and in which interaction is reduced to occasional decision-making.

Visual Novel joins its long-accepted brethren Interactive Movie, Interactive Fiction, and Interactive Fiction with Graphics as an important division of Adventure games.

Users should not worry about corrections: a list of visual novels will be sent shortly to admins, and the sub-genre will be added to them very soon.

The Top MobyGames Contributor of 2009 is, for the first time, joyvalley from Germany. It is the first time since 2005 that the Top Year Contributor is not Sciere. Joyvalley is the second German contributor to have won this title (after Xoleras in 2004).

He also established a record for most points scored in one year, with 32,258 points.

2009 also saw several dramatic changes on the Top 50 All-Time Contributors ladder, including the veteran Unicorn Lynx becoming the second All-Time contributor, reaching the 70,000 points mark.

Unfortunately, the year 2009 also saw some regress. 8 Contributors have scored 10,000 points or more during this year - as opposed to 11 in 2008. The Nr. 50 contributor scored "only" 1937 points in 2009, compared to 1952 points in the previous year.

Generally, more changes were made to the site than during the preceding year, but none as important as adding the Browser platform in 2008. The new search engine is one of the most notable additions of 2009. However, it is still in testing stage, with bugs that haven't yet been fixed.

Hopefully the year 2010 will see increase in contributions, and, most importantly, addition of new platforms, that have been "waiting in the queue" for a very long time (such as Sharp X68000 and FM Towns).