It's a fairly well-established trend in the gaming industry that movie tie-in titles tend towards mediocrity. With a few notable exceptions ("Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay," the LotR brawler series, and a few others), most games developed in tandem with movies are half-baked, poorly conceived, and generally pretty bad. But if games made from movies tend towards mediocrity, the reverse -- movies made from games -- often end up as abominations of cinema, enjoyable only to the extent that they're laughable.

The big news this week has been the insanity surrounding EA's recent release "Spore," and the blowback to the included draconian SecuROM DRM protection that shipped with it. There are more than 2,000 one-star reviews on Amazon.com lambasting the game's restrictive protections, and many comments have legitimate points.

In my last column, I mentioned in passing "Sins of a Solar Empire," a title that has become a financial success while selling discs and digital copies without any form of copy protection. This week, publisher Stardock revealed exactly how much of a success -- 500,000 units, with 100,000 of those sales coming from digital distribution. While that's not exactly up to par with "GTA IV'"s 10 million units sold since release, for an independent, non-franchise game with a budget of only $1,000,000, it's practically a runaway hit.

When I was in first grade, I thought that war should really be settled by board game. So it comes as a welcome surprise to see that the rappers Bow Wow and The Game have decided to challenge each other not to a quickdraw, but to a game of "Madden '09." The stakes? $100k, to be donated by the loser to charity.

In a move that worked so well for the RIAA, five video game publishers -- Atari, Codemasters, Reality Pump, Techland and Topware Interactive -- have decided to go after 25,000 file-sharers who have been allegedly violating their intellectual property rights and distributing their games online.

Today's ephemeral buzz may very well be tomorrow's new wave of products. One of the buzz items that caught my attention this week was a leaked video of a potential virtual world connected to one of the MySpace co-founders, Brad Greenspan. This virtual world has an interesting angle -- it's built on an engine called OTOY, which is a graphics engine that does its rendering in a "cloud."

Second Life, which allows users an extremely high level of freedom compared to competing virtual worlds, is heading towards becoming more regulated. The big issues is advertising.

Rather than talking about one specific topic this week, I'm going to briefly mention several things that caught my eye....

After entertaining millions of users and wasting a countless number of office worker man-hours, the ultra-popular Facebook app Scrabulous looks to be nearing the end of its run on Facebook. Hasbro has filed suit against the developers, claiming that the game infringes on its Scrabble intellectual property. Earlier this month, Hasbro launched its own version of Scrabble on Facebook in partnership with Electronic Arts.

y today, many sources have already commented on E3's lost edge. What used to be the Mecca of game conferences was a disappointment, with many publishers pulling from the ESA and with it, its participation with the event -- but most of all, there were underwhelming announcements from the big consoles. However, I think those announcements reveal a great deal about the larger strategies of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, and are instructive examples of how even the industry leaders are navigating blindly in dangerous waters.