Bruce has a pretty good ES blog posting on the studios closing.

http://www.ensemblestudios.com/blogs/bshelley/archive/2008/09/22/ensemble-studios-closing.aspx

I think I might phrase my opinion of the decision to close the studio with a little more ... emotion, but hopefully that gets around the intertubes and can clear up at least some of the factual errors (like that there were immediate layoffs -- there were not).

On as more positive note, I'm having a blast with Rock Band 2 and Warhammer Online (and a ton of other great releases in the past month).  I suspect work on Halo Wars is really going to amp up as we want to finish it out in style and with the love it deserves, so that may cut into my future gaming time a bit...

While us law-abiding citizens have to wait until Sunday to play Spore (which I can't wait to do), apparently the pirate sites already have a full rip of it.

Ok, this isn't anything new, but now EA has a freaking digital download service.  The game is out legitimately elsewhere in the world as well.  Why punish your rules-following, paying customers by making them wait until after the criminals?  In the long term this just isn't going to be healthy for anyone, I fear.

I've been playing Mercenaries 2 pretty much non-stop since it came out on Sunday.  Very convenient to come out on a three-day weekend like that!  If GTA IV hadn't come out, this would easily be the best open-world game this generation, and in some ways I like it more than GTA.  GTA is more polished, but Mercs 2 isn't afraid to just plain be fun. 

I play a lot of games but it's relatively rare that I get "gamelock" on any one particular game anymore, and can play nothing else.  Mercs 2 accomplished that easily.  My brief foray into co-op was a lot of fun, but I was too eager to unlock more in single player.  Now that I know my way around the game a bit more, I think co-op may be the gift that keeps on giving.

It certainly has it's share of flaws -- if you are looking for a game where you will never see a weird physics problem or movement glitch, look elsewhere.  Audio clips are very repetitive, and sometimes things just kind of break.  But those little bad moments are, for me at least, completely overshadowed by the Pure Awesome that suffuses the rest of the experience.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to chasing down a few more HVTs for the PLAV.