Extra Credits, an Escapist video series, spoke up recently about a disappointing advertising trend at Electronic Arts. The development and publishing giant has plunged into a negative attention death spiral. The whole thing started around their “Sin to Win” marketing push for Dante’s Inferno and has gaffed onward through the “Your Mom Hates Dead Space [...]

Mirror’s Edge takes the strengths of Sonic the Hedgehog and Prince of Persia, but it mixes them poorly and harms both for it. That said, the game makes an uncommonly skillful foray into platforming in a first person perspective that’s a joy to play. Mirror’s Edge isn’t always good, but when it is, it’s great.

Torrentfreak, a filesharing blog with a focus on Bittorrent, has posted a quick stat dump for the most pirated video games of 2008. Although they don’t explicitly unpack how the stats were obtained, a quick trek through their ancestral links suggests that they directly query from the torrent trackers at popular websites like The Pirate Bay.

Will Wright, famed creator of pretty much any game with the prefix “Sim,” wins for most pirate-able developer. His sim-everything game Spore graces the top of the list, followed by his casual mega-hit The Sims 2. Between these two games, Will Wright holds a commanding 37% download lead over his closest follower, Assassin’s Creed.

Spore earlier stirred up a gamer outcry over its draconian SecuRom DRM scheme, which limited consumers to three installs per purchase. Although there’s no provable causal link between the the game’s arduous DRM and extensive piracy, SecuRom doesn’t seem to have spared Spore from seeing the top of this list.

Spore’s primacy is also surprising in light of the fact it was released just this year in September. Looking at the list, 6 of the top 10 games were released one or more years ago. This shouldn’t be surprising as the previous year’s holiday games are the banner titles that everyone wants to pirate. What is surprising, however, is that Spore overran them all in just two months.

Outside Spore, the list is pretty diverse. No single genre is represented by more than two games. Four of the games are more than 40 hours long or are open-ended, while none of them are shorter than 6 hours (though your mileage may vary). Most games are from the last two years, but The Sims 2 and GTA: San Andreas appear to have some staying power.

In short, even limited to the highest volumes, Piracy appears to be largely unfocused (unless you count AAA games as a focus), unless your name is Will Wright. Congratulations to Mr. Wright on his popularity, I guess.