I’m a big fan of the old Guns n’ Roses so it amused me to see that the Dr. Pepper soft drink brand has reportedly offered to give a free can of Dr. Pepper to everyone in America if Chinese Democracy is released this year.

I don’t suppose that soft drink fans will be getting their hopes too high, though - Chinese Democracy has been in the works since around 1994 and it still has no set release date. Expenses to this point apparently exceed $13 million. D:

Stumbled across this whilst checking how Phoenix’s season was going at the 3/4 point of the NBA season.

The first dive is comedy in itself; but the reaction to Shaq’s similar buildup when he doesn’t dive the second time is brilliant.

Gameplanet has word of a new Starcraft II trailer. I never really got into the original Starcraft, but I’m looking forward to this - Blizzard historically just doesn’t make bad games and it’s been a long time since a real-time strategy game has interested me. Here’s the trailer:

I read on the forums last night that EA Games president Frank Gibeau has noticed that sales of Need for Speed: ProStreet weren’t quite as good as EA had hoped. And I quote:

Noting that sales of last year’s Need for Speed ProStreet didn’t live up to EA’s hopes for the game, Gibeau said he thinks it was because the series drifted too far from what consumers expected. ProStreet had dropped the tuner culture and police evasion aspects of previous installments in favor of perfectly legit closed track racing. For the next Need for Speed, Gibeau promised that the series would be getting back to its roots with a number of features, including open-world racing and a new highway battle mode.

Personally I wonder if the drop in sales is more to do with the fact that EA has released one or more new NFS title almost every year since the series debuted way back in 1995 - the only years without a release were 1996 and 2002.

Face it, guys - you’ve been milking the franchise for so long that its nipples are sore and swollen. It’s time to give it a rest. Move the schedule to a new game every two years, make every new release worth its asking price and restore some confidence in your brand amongst critical gamers.

We’ve known for a long time with Gameplanet Store that our content needs to be the driving force behind people visiting on a regular basis, so we put a lot of work in to keep the site fresh with daily news, rotating features, frequently-updating top-sellers lists and so on. The content that really matters though is the product pages; because obviously it’s pretty hard to sell something if the potential buyer doesn’t quite know what it is.

We think we already invest more (wo)man hours into this area than any other online store in the country, and with our New Site coming soon we are renewing our focus on content and plan to take it to another level again.

The first step is our Music category. We’ve spent the last few days updating hundreds of music CDs so that they have more complete descriptions, images and, in many cases, track samples that you can listen to. At present we think that about half of our music catalog has great data, so although there’s a lot done there’s also a long way to go - but, if you watch carefully over the next couple of weeks, you will notice everything improving almost before your very eyes.

On a related note, we have been amused numerous times in the past to see employees in bricks-and-mortar gaming stores looking up GP Store whenever a customer makes an enquiry about the release date of an upcoming game. We’ve also noticed recently that our images - now that we’ve started watermarking them - appear to be quite popular with another major gaming store’s Web site. Apparently they haven’t noticed the watermark. I wouldn’t want to be the guy that has to redo all of those images once they realise.

We’re not quite sure whether it’s flattering or disappointing that other businesses - and even the customers of other businesses - find us to be such a useful resource. We guess we’re doing something right.