Sometime in late October I got Guitar Hero. After playing for a while I decided to leave my PS2 on thinking I would get right back to it. Believe it or not I do not play games as much as one would think helping run MobyGames. Well I didn't get back for a month or more. I guess I left the PS2 on this entire time and now the DVD laser refuses to track. The little guy boots up but every disk I put in gets a "Disk read error." I am not really surprised since I own the big clunky first rev PS2. Way back when there were reports of laser tracking problem. Heck I remember this guy I worked with would play Gran Turismo 3 for a while then put his PS2 in the freezer. I guess some of the early systems got hot and the laser stopped tracking. Xbox 360 owners take heart. Well figuring you cannot break what is already broken I decided to open up my system and see if I could fix it. Needless to say after 30 minutes I picked up all the pieces and threw the lot in the garbage. My question now is do I buy a replacement? There are a few games I am still interested in. However I think it may be a waste of money buying a system that is definitely in its last moments of life.

Merry Christmas y'all.

Only a week after the Dutch contributor Koffiepad reached 10000 contribution points, the fellow European (Czech) contributor and approver B.L. Stryker became the 15th MobyGames contributor ever to reach this amount.

6 MobyGames contributors have scored 10000 points or more in 2005. In comparison, only 3 were able to do that last year.

Almost simultaneously, two of the leading MobyGames contributors, Nr. 4 Oliver Jahn and Nr. 5 MAT have reached 40000 and 30000 contribution points, respectively.

MobyGames contributor Iggy Drougge has made it to the Top 50 MobyGames contributors of all times, scoring 2868 points.

Help make MobyGames better. Take this survey. MobyGames refuses to serve Pop Up, Pop Under advertising or sell, share or rent your personal and private information to anyone in any form. However this project does cost money to run. Advertising helps underwrite some of the expense of our bandwidth and hosting. By filling out this survey you will hopefully help attract better advertisers to MobyGames. Maybe the ads you see will be something you're interested in. Maybe not, but every little bit helps.

Wikipedia has been getting a lot of heat lately and undeservedly so in my opinion. I personally believe that Wikipedia is a great website and is an example of the great democratic and collective efforts of the Internet. The belief in a community driven project ( Wikipedia, MobyGames, IMDb to name a few ) is really the belief in the goodness of mankind. It is a belief that there are people out there that are passionate about the same things we are. That these people will donate their precious time and labor to help educate and inform strangers on the 'Net. That they believe these types of projects are important and we, other people, are better off because of their existence. It is also a belief that these "good" people completely outnumber the griefers, cranksters, liars and jerks that will intentionally try and seed erroneous, misleading or incorrect information. Community driven projects are based on the principle that peer review and self policing efforts are the best means to maintain quality.

Wikipedias critics argue there is no accountability. People can contribute whatever they wish to Wikipedia anonymously. However ultimately the Wikipedia Media Foundation is responsible and accountable. The same is true with MobyGames. Ultimately Brian, myself, Jim and Rob are responsible and accountable for the quality of everything that goes on at MobyGames. Errors happen. A database as large as Wikipedia is bound to have errors. MobyGames has errors. Yet each week hundreds or error reports flow in from MobyGames users. Every day Wikipedia articles are updated and fixed. Every game every is seen by thousands of people. Errors are corrected and corrected quickly. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica has errors from time to time. I may be able to find out who edited a specific edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I certainly won't know who wrote any specific article. The question I must ask is: Who cares? When was the last time you looked in the Encyclopedia Britannica? My argument is that commercial encyclopedias are no more accountable than community driven projects. Worse still, I believe in this day and age they are totally irrelevant.

In a few years we will know who is right. We pour our efforts into MobyGames so you know where I stand.

For those of you King's Quest fans who have been following the campaign to save the KQ9 project, you may recall Vivendi's request that they discontinue the project just before it was about to be released, and that a petition was made to save it. Well, I am happy to tell you that after thousands of signatures, Vivendi has finally agreed to let the KQ9 team continue work on the project. Unfortunately, because of the dispute, KQ9 cannot be released until sometime 2006, but I think it is worth the wait. Perhaps they plan to add new features that they forgot to implement before it was due for release. Don't you just hate copyright laws?

MobyUser Koffiepad just became the 14th contributor in the history of MobyGames to reach 10,000 contribution points. Congratulations, and keep up the great work!

A full year ago we mentioned Acclaim's (Info) Bankruptcy and the selling of all assets from their headquarters building. Well now it's gone beyond mere furniture and the actual IP and publishing rights to various games are up for sale. Public Viewing of the files associates with the games are available December 6 and December 7 if you're in the Oceanside, NY area (contact details available on website). Happy Holidays to all the gamers!