You may have noticed a lull around the Contraptica “office”, we have not forgotten about you.  Several things have kept us from our duties including the recurring WoW addiction and the trappings of everyday life… meaning our day jobs. What I wouldn’t give to just be able to sit down and play a bunch of games to my hearts content and give you all the lay down.  I digress, keep an eye out for some new reviews as this editor has done his fair share of non WoW gaming and has a fresh line up for you. Expect a rather humorous article on the ill fated Mattel Hyperscan and it’s dismal selection of games, a brand new development tool for the Atari Jaguar, and a mobile review here and there. Until then, keep on gaming!

Hey everyone, EmOneGarand here. Thought I would inform you all that in the spirit of getting Contraptica up and running I have reformatted all my previous reviews from Xbox Topic to the new format we will now use from now on, some of the old scores didn’t translate as well as I had hope but bear with me hah. I have 3 more XBLA reviews coming soon so keep an eye out. Happy gaming everybody!

We here at Contraptica would like to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving!  A few years ago I remember playing a Thanksgiving day game of Madden with some of my cousins, and heard John Madden proclaim “Happy Turkey Day!” prior to the game.  What are you doing for fun on this day off?  Found any easter (turkey) eggs in your games?

Since I began XboxTopic.com back in February I’ve occasionally gotten into lulls where there really wasn’t alot of interesting Xbox related news to comment on, and the site certainly suffered.  Sure I could post an announcement of every sports release, or the latest racing game, and many people would be into that.  But since this is a hobby, I really can’t personally review every game.  And believe it or not, I do things other than poke around on my 360.  To help make the site able to flourish with my own various interests, I’ve expanded the scope to include any and all technology, IT, gaming, movie and any other types of media and commentary.

I certainly expect that things will skew 360 for the forseeable future, but there are plans for many other things, including a new DS feature starting today.  Plus Matt will be contributing various news and reviews, along with a special ongoing retro gaming feature.  I apologize ahead of time for the sections on the site that have few articles at the moment.

Another focus in this redesign is towards community building, and soon comments will be enabled here at Contraptica.

And why “Contraptica”?  Well, we like to talk about all sorts of contraptions here, and at the same time are paying homage to Engadget, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, Slashdot and Joystiq, who we’re big fans of.

There’s much to catch up with here at Xbox Topic, but first off I’d like to apologize for the slow updates.  But wow, what a week!  Madden 2008 has finally been released, and I’ve been pretty much playing the 360 version when I’m home, and the DS version when I’m away.  The game is tight, and while I didn’t much play Madden 07 on 360, it seems as though having 2K sports pushing EA (with All Pro Football 2k8), a more inspired product was released.  Full review will be forthcoming, once I’ve done some more with the franchise mode.

Secondly, I have one simple command for all of you.  Download the Bioshock demo.  If you weren’t one of the lucky ones to grab it from Toys R Us before they halted the broken street date, that is.  I played through the demo last night, and was met with an amazing world, immediately reminiscent of Ayn Rand, right down to the fonts used.  The game is stylistically superb, the gameplay tight, and the story captivating.  With the game scoring 10/10 from most reviewers, it’s easy to understand what all the buzz is about.  Without a multiplayer option though, Bioshock’s audience will unfortunately be more limited than it’s Unreal Engine cousin Gears of War.

As I mentioned earlier, updates have been slow from time to time, and typically those times coincide with me spending a lot of time on DS.  As such, I’m thinking of ways of expanding Xbox Topic to incorporate other topics as well.  Stay tuned for details as I work through the kinks.  But worry not Xbox faithful, the 360 coverage will remain.

After seeing that Major Nelson was going and updating the code for his site, I thought I’d check here for updates and lo and behold, I still hadn’t applied the latest updates.  I finally updated the wordpress code for this blog, now it’s running the latest and greatest. You faithful readers shouldn’t notice anything different, hopefully.