Gamespot, by now you've probably noted my lengthy absence. My permanent departure from this website has probably been obvious at this point, but I felt the need to post this final entry to provide some closure.

I want to deeply thank all of you that contributed to my Gamespot experience. Whether it was reading my blogs, playing with me over Xbox live, or writing your own amazing user content you truly made my experience and all the time I spent here completely worth it. You first met me as a high school freshman, enamored with video games and searching for people who shared a similar passion. I posted, commented on, and checked this site constantly (along withhunting for emblems among other things), and thoroughly enjoyed myself and the friends I made here.

All of you compelled me in my earlier years to become active and frequently post here, but with that advice I learned something about myself to which I cannot thank you enough. Before my Gamespot years, I never considered myself a good English student or writer, but the embrace and reception of all my soapbox editorials and reviews slowly changed that opinion. With the initial help from the Community Contributions Union I began improving my writing on my own and have now developed exponentially. With your help, my English grades rose from average and acceptable to the topof my class, earning me a 5 on the AP English exam, a 760 on both the reading and writing portions of my SAT, and the constant attention of many Universities like New York University, University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin. But most importantly, you provided me with the comfort and solace of a real, concrete talent; and have given me career direction for the rest of my life.

I would like to personally thank all those that read my blogs and became good friends of mine here including, but not limited to DouglassBuffone, Tish, Butters782, Fishdalf, Edu,NeoJedi, Reetesh, Earthking, Knight of Malta, and Kreestas. With all the things going on in my life with girlfriends, colleges, jobs, futures, and guitar my interests have significantly changed in these three years and video games have really taken a backseat. I still read the website and get on xbox live occasionally, but if you're interested in keeping in touch with me, I've updated my contact information.

So this is the final, climactic goodbye Gamespot, Godspeed

Sincerely,

~James

Merry Christmas guys. We all have festivities to attend to, and other blogs to read so I'll make this quick. The ony game I received this year was Gears of War 2, but other highlights included a gps for my car, an ipod home, and tickets to see a friend of mine in New York for a week!

Have a merry Chrstmas and a happy new year

~James

I return to you from a lengthy absence but not to talk about games. I might as well dispel the inevitable suspicion that I'm leaving, which isn't true. I'm far less active and less interested in this site and games in general that I used to be, but neither one of those things is going away just yet. Nevertheless, I felt like voicing my personal opinion on a bit of recent controversy and irrelevant as it may be here, I figured a few of you might be interested.

Recently, Coldplay has been accused of plagiarizing their hit "Viva la Vida" from Joe Satriani's "If I could Fly". This seems strange because all of Satriani's music is instrumental where Coldplay use lyrics to get their message across. Listening to each song separately, they sound a bit similar, but it's hard to say that plagiarism is involved. Lots of music sounds similar, and accusing Coldplay just seems nitpicky. I didn't think so initially, but after the songs are played together viva la vida does serve to be a perfect backing track for learning to fly.

Still, I'm not sure that one exact chord progression can really be copyrighted. I mean, if every technical aspect of music began to be copyrighted so that anything similar was punishable under copyright infringement we would eventually start to run our of music. There's only so much you can do that's completely original and new without using similar musical ideas from another artist. Music has always been influenced by past musicians with an admirable $tyles and persistent lawsuits over something that sounds similar would simply lead to less commercial music releases.

That would be just like car companies copyrighting every exact measurement of their vehicles and suing any competitors who made a car that matched some of those specifications. Or Nintendo suing a story driven adventure game (even though that genre may be less popular than it once was) for using many of the same elements that made Ocarina of Time such a great game. As soon as anybody comes up with a formula for something that is successful, bits and pieces of it are going to be taken and transformed to make something different and arguing that the formula is yours and yours alone is a futile endeavor.

As for Coldplay, their song does sound eerily like Satriani's, but I don't think that was intentional. They most likely just made up that chord progression in the studio, liked it and built a song around it just like Satriani did.

Anyways, that's my opinion on the issue, and hopefully I will be able to get back here a little more often than I have and catch up on everything I've missed.

Later,

~James