In case you've been wondering what I've been working on for the last 3 months or so...http://fuse.gamespot.com/is now unofficially open beta (real/official announcement coming soon).

You may have noticed that I haven't been very active lately in the GameSpot community. Okay, maybe "lately" is a stretch, how about "in a long time?" And maybe you noticed that 12 months ago and totally forgot I existed by now... Whatever the case may be, I'm kicking off one of my 2011 goals a month early.

For 2011, one of my goals is to blog on GameSpot at least once a month. I have no idea whether or not this will actually happen beyond the first month or two. I've kind of become a fan of the hourly or daily mind dump in 140 characters or less. But I'm also finding that it is hard to communicate something effectively in such a small amount of words/time. So this experiment will be to try both and see what happens.

So where have I been? I don't really know. Hopefully living my life. I have a 2.5yr old boy & a loving wife who have been (appropriately & deservingly) the focus of my attention for the last year or two. And after those two there's the usual hodgepodge of work, health, friends, hobbies, etc. that take up your time. It all adds up to not enough time (and sleep) so I cut back quite a bit. The chaos of a new family member has now become more familiar and routine so you should start seeing more of me. At the very least, I'll be posting in this blog now & again.

It feels really weird to sum up the last 2 years like that. The programmer brain in me wants to throw together a quick bullet list of the highlights but I don't want to just list them out. There's the usual good and bad, happy and sad, solid and plaid.

I hope you all have been well and I'm looking forward to being more active with the community again.

Take care,

Mike

We released an update to the GameSpot forum search today. The changes were made to provide more reliable search results and make the forums perform a bit better.

The searches are now running on the Sphinx search server. Sphinx is designed for full-text searches and is a perfect match for the forums. Because the searches are running on the Sphinx server they no longer cause general forum slowdowns when a large # of searches are done at once.

If you are interested, there are a few tips & tricks you can now do to get more specific search results.

The "|" character allows you to do an OR search. e.g., search for: mario | zelda

The "+" character allows you to require a word to be part of the search. e.g., search for: (mario | zelda) +time

If you surround your search term in quotes (") then it will search for that exact combined term. See the difference between: of legend and "of legend" You'll notice that The Legend of Zelda is not included in the second search.

Good luck & good searching!

The game collections will be down for maintenance on Wednesday February 25th from 6am to 7am PT. You can still view your collections but you will not be able to add, track or make any changes during this time.

mini-feed now updating more frequently (eom)

Wow, a video game related entry. I'm surprised by myself. :)

Check out this article on engadget about a Commodore 64 LAN party. Pretty cool stuff.

wow, it's been a while since I posted here. been super busy... Mario Kart, GTA IV, baby in the over... one of these days I'll write a real blog post again. Until then hope you're having fun. :)

Wow, I just realized it has been a really long time since I last blogged here. We (GS programmers) have been busy these last few months. The first of many new and exciting things coming out of recent R&D launched yesterday. GameSpot now has a Wii customized site. It isn't a full version of the site on the Wii (that would be lame anyway) but it gets you the information you want where you want it. If you're like me, you hate looking through the virtual games on the Wii then having to go somewhere else to find out if they're any good. Nintendo just displays those little graphics, bad ones at that, and no real data about the games. Now we are giving you that info via the Opera web browser that you can use on the Wii.

Some of the current features:

- Console game ratings

- Latest Wii news

- Interactions via the Wiimote (the controller) such as twisting to rate a game or shaking to change things

- People who don't have a GameSpot account can still rate games!

- If you do have a GameSpot account and are logged in, your ratings will show up on both sites.

Things coming either soon or in the relatively near future:

- Video. The Wii only supports flash 7 so we need to make a few updates to our player to be flash 7.

- PMs. I believe donkeljohn said he wants this there.

What else do you want there? Sound off and let us know. Send us your suggestions in the Site Enhancements & Feedback forum.

Well, technically I didn't buy it, my wife did. She decided to give me my x-mas present early this year. I don't game that often so could never really justify buying one myself. Especially since I think fair is fair and she would get something $$ too if I did. :P Well, she got her GPS for x-mas and I got my Xbox.

The only games I have right now are the two that came in the bundle - Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I did go out and buy Oblivion but the disk is busted and I can't actually play it. ;( That actually has me kind of mad, but at least they said (over the phone) that they'll swap it out for me.

I also added my Gamertag to my profile. Yippee, a whole 80 points. :)