Another cog has been added to the LittleBigPlanet this week: a website, which should help to get the potentially massive ball of kinetic users rolling after the game's "big bang" this October. For now, "LittleBigPlanet News" predictably functions as a hype machine, luring in audiences with that adorable SackBoy and his widget full of stickers (visitors can actually customize the background of the site with an extremely modest sampling of the game's content). The welcome message reveals that, eventually, the LBP site will "evolve into something much bigger and better to support our community of Players, Creators and Sharers." And who might those important sounding folk be? Why, you of course! Remember: The fate of this little, er, big? planet is in your hands. (Cue ominous music.)

Like the subject of a James Lipton (pictured) interview, Cory Barlog, creative director on God of War, enjoyed the fluffiest time on the receiving end of a journalist's questions in the latest Sony blog post. So fluffy, in fact, that there wasn't even a journalist asking the questions. It was Barlog asking the questions, which he then answered. But wait, it gets better. Instead of talking about the game he's working on, namely God of War: Chains of Olympus, the self-scribed interview tangents into "mini-E3." Although an utterly pointless post that actually takes shots at Min-E3, it's still fun to watch a developer ask questions to himself, which he then answers back.

Our favorite question in the "interview" is when Barlog asks himself if he could sit one person in front of his game, who would it be? Barlog answers himself, "Jack Thompson. I think after 5 minutes of playing the game that hard crunchy exterior would melt away and reveal his candy coated liberal center." Best answer ever! Only to be outdone a few moments later saying that he doesn't really consider Min-E3 a real E3, so when he attends this year it'll be his "7 and 1/2" time going. He also says he wants to play BioShock (a non-PS3 title as far as we know, which is kinda refreshing to see on the site). We hope to actually speak to Barlog at Min-E3 about Chains of Olympus, or at least host witness to him talking to himself about it. By the way, we're totally kidding around here about Barlog interviewing himself. It's just that the byline to the Sony post says it was written by Cory Barlog instead of giving the actual author who then pasted Barlog's answers into the ongoing series.

Sony executives are really loving their new blog. Even Sony America President and CEO Jack Tretton's ghost writer has written a post for the site about "a quick look back" and " a strong push forward" ... and we all know why the look back is quick.

Anyway, Tretton finally gets to craft a public message without pesky things like words and journalists getting in the way. The Sony blog is a place for Tretton to breath free and just talk to the consumer like an open and honest ... oh, what's that? Tretton says, "Everything communicated in any form these days has to be considered an 'on-the-record statement' so as much as I'd like to, I can't completely throw my corporate hat out the window." Ok, so maybe the information won't flow like the spice on Arrakis, but we're still listening Jack, so what's on your mind?

From the "It's About Time" department comes word that Sony has just launched the official PlayStation blog titled, unsurprisingly, PlayStation.Blog. To be clear, we're not talking about the "semi-official" ThreeSpeech (or Major Nelson for that matter); this is a straight-up "official" blog run directly off Sony's own servers. What can we expect from the site? Well, that's not clear yet. SCEA's Patrick Seybold writes, "At the moment, we're thinking about sharing all sorts of things here, ranging from product news and title announcements to developer updates and industry opinion posts – all of which will come straight from the people here inside SCEA who are working, thinking and playing with this stuff everyday."

Want to let them know what you want them to write about? They have comments enabled and, to help ensure those comments are productive, have a comment policy. As for us? We'd love to be able to check there for all of your PlayStation-related media alerts and press releases, that sorta thing. Oh, and the scoop on what exactly is included in those sometimes mysterious PS3 firmware updates. Oh, and maybe the ability to change that password (look who's talking, we know). That's it. For now. Welcome to the jungle, Sony! Let us know if you need a tour guide, we'd be glad to help out where we can.

People on the internet generally don't enjoy reading long articles. We understand. You've got places to go, people to see, episodes of Heroes to watch. Who has time to actually scroll through several screens worth of writing when there's so much to do?

That being said, we heartily recommend that you set aside a few minutes and read through PC Gamer's epic account of what is likely the longest game of Galactic Civilizations 2 ever played.

How long exactly? The "Gigantic" sized match has been going on for 16 days now and is just beginning to show signs of an imminent ending. Besides being routinely laugh-out-loud funny, Tom Francis' running account captures the intricacies of interstellar diplomacy, taxation, genocide, despotism, popularity rankings, and extremely foolhardy military planning in a form that even people unfamiliar with the game will find interesting.

Go ahead and read it. That status report will still be there in fifteen minutes.

[Via Kieron Gillen]

[Update: The Kotaku suit has been dismissed by Federal District Court Judge Paul Huck, GamePolitics.com is now reporting. Apparently, Thompson "failed to follow the proper federal court procedure for amending a complaint." Thompson says he'll try it again though, so please, read on.]

The smoldering battle between Florida lawyer Jack Thompson and the gaming press has been taken to a new level. In a tersely worded post yesterday on Kotaku, Brian Crecente revealed that Thompson has added a complaint against Kotaku owner Gawker Media to a March 13 suit against the Florida Bar.

The childishly-worded complaint (He actually makes a "NOT!" joke on page 27) focuses on a few Kotaku commenters (which Thompson mistakenly refers to as "bloggers") that allegedly said Thompson "should be shot ... struck with a baseball bat, shot in the face by an irate gamer, [and] castrated and his testicles stuffed down his throat," among other things. To be fair, those are some strong, hateful words, and threats like these are not necessarily protected by the first amendment. Still, Gawker or Kotaku probably can't be held liable for them -- a federal judge ruled in June 2006 that "bloggers cannot be hit with libel suits on the basis of anonymous postings on their Web sites."

Perhaps knowing this, Thompson goes a different route in his complaint by alleging Kotaku is part of a "civil conspiracy ... to deprive Thompson of his various basic constitutional rights" and that the site is "attempt[ing] to intimidate a citizen for the exercise of his constitutional rights." Mark Methenitis goes into detail on what exactly is legally wrong with this overreach over at his Law of the Game blog. All we'll add is that we're sickened by this obvious attempt at legal intimidation and we support our blogging brothers at Gawker all the way.

Why can't Sony blog? That's the question Opposable Thumbs posed this morning as it reluctantly accepted the arrival of a new PlayStation 3 update, described simply as v1.3. Like other curious downloaders, the site turned to internet forums for details, finding only a jumbled mess of threads with contradictory opinions. Eventually, a translation of a Japanese explanation of the Japanese update was uncovered. Phew!

So why is Sony making it so hard on us? Why no Major Nelson or Gamerscoresque blog? Certainly the semi-official Three Speech site isn't up to the task -- this morning's posts neglected to mention the update even in passing. There's simply no excuse for not providing the public with a dedicated space on the PlayStation website or elsewhere that provides timely information about firmware updates and other content additions.

"My job as designer of Gears of War is, well, more or less done," writes CliffyB in his latest blog, titled "fin." The Gears lead designer is now off to fulfill his duties for the hype machine, leaving us to assume that Epic's game is gold and ready to lead Microsoft's holiday charge. Of course, Cliffy "can't speak to the status of gold" ... or can he? During a recent interview with Major Nelson, the designer clearly drops the "gold" word:

"We actually found out like about week before we went gold that [the final boss] was actually too tough to beat, even on casual." [8:19]

[Thanks, Baker]

Ritual Entertainment is about to release four extra maps and a new gameplay mode for Sin Episodes, at no extra charge for auto-download via Steam (the "no charge" bit will no doubt make many console owners jealous). The four new maps will be dedicated to the new mode called "Arena"--which is a single player experience akin to many games' survival modes--and will be designed around typically generic first person shooter situations like an office, a turbine room and a processing plant. Shawn, the lead game designer of Sin lays it down on his blog; "It's an infinitely repayable single player mode where you continually try and beat your high score". Our translation: "shoot loads of people and then obsess over the number of enemies you shot in the groin".

Other bits mentioned on Shawn's blog include a comprehensive stat tracking system, enabling yourself and other players to compare their groinshot score, the mention of the impending release of a Software Development Kit (SDK) and a Sin development Wiki, and absolutely no news about when Episode 2 is going to hit Steam; Shawn got a little excited and forgot to give us any information beyond saying that he'd "be on the look out for some Episode 2 media in the near future" if he was you. We want dates dammit!

[Via EuroGamer]

Thanks to the folks at the Gamerscore Blog, we've learned that the next Xbox back compat update "should be out in the next few weeks."

In his earlier blast against BC, Peter Moore proclaimed that nobody is concerned about it anymore, but thankfully the gentler Gamerscore peeps have set the record straight, stating: "We know for a fact that there are lots of people who continue to care about backwards compatibility, including the 'Emulation Ninjas' who are working full time on the updates. And those of us posting on this blog. And, of course, many of you."

We suppose quarterly updates to the BC list aren't TOO bad (hey, they sure beat semiannual dashboard updates), but getting more than a dozen titles to work each time would definitely help a lot more for those with original Xbox favorites they'd prefer to play on their new machines. Personally, this blogger would like to see the following titles added to the list: Dead or Alive Ultimate, Doom 3, Capcom vs. SNK 2, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Project Gotham Racing 2, LEGO Star Wars, Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, Soul Calibur II, and Capcom Classics Collection. It may not be realistic to expect Street Fighter support when Hyper Fighting is set to hit Live Arcade sometime in the near future, but one can (vainly) hope.

[Via Major Nelson's blog]

See also:

• Xbox BC not a priority, says Moore
• No Black on 360 till MS makes it so... or a sequel comes out
• US 360 backward-compatibility list shrinks
• A video tour of the Xbox Live Spring update
• SFII on Xbox Live: what's taking so long?