If I owned a fledgling virtual world I don't think I would provide a separate lobby for the paying customers. Sony should give PlayStation Plus users amazing things and force them to run around making the peasants envious of what they can't have unless they hand over their credit card information. 

News Blips:

Sony is cordoning off an exclusive PlayStation Plus Private Members Club in Home for -- you guessed it -- PlayStation Plus members only. The space will offer several tables of Shed, a card game for two to four players. Naturally, like all things exclusive, the room is decked out in gold decor, with an intimidating bouncer at the front door to keep out the riff-raff. "The space also offers a couple of great ways to stay updated on all the latest PlayStation Plus news, either by reviewing a cocktail menu or watching the trailers running on the big screen," writes Alex Weekes, Home community lead at Sony Europe, on the PlayStation Blog. 

An official Capcom video reveals Evil Ryu and Oni Akuma  for the arcade edition of Super Street Fighter 4. The trailer is a promo for the new arcade version that ends with art of Evil Ryu and Oni Akuma back-to-back. Previously, leaked Xbox 360 achievements suggested the existence of Evil Ryu, and this trailer seems to confirm that this is the case. It isn't clear how the new versions of these existing characters will fit into the current roster or if they will even be playable. The Street Fighter 3 twins Yun and Yang were confirmed in September, but Capcom remained vague about changes to the lineup beyond those two. It will be interesting to see how the hardcore community reacts if the addition Oni Akuma or Evil Ryu drastically disturbs the game's delicate balance.

Video-game-number-crunching website VGChartz uses the power of bar graphs to illustrate just how infrequently some game journalists practice journalism. The study took randomly selected chunks of posts from Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid -- three of the popular punching bags for critics of games journalism -- and looked for a variety of things like editorializing in news posts. It turns out that 78 percent of the articles only had one source, which the VGChartz story insists is a problem. Of course, while it is a good rule of thumb to have more than one authority commenting on a subject, how many confirmations can there possibly be for "Rock Band 3 getting full Steely Dan catalog"? Another interesting tidbit from the study shows that "unrelated topics" were discussed nine percent of the time, which is second only to Electronic Arts. The article didn't make it clear who decides what is unrelated or if the author had separate definitions for "related topics" for the three different websites.  

About time! The theme from Civilization 4, "Baba Yetu" by composer Christopher Tin, has become the first piece of music composed for a video game to be nominated for a Grammy Award. "Baba Yetu" has been a fan favorite since Civ 4 was released in 2005. It was a featured song at Video Games Live and was one of the pieces used for the PBS recording of that show. If you haven't heard the song, you owe it to yourself to track it down. What took the Grammys so long to nominate this treasure? Tin only recently released his debut album, and apparently the Grammy voters are too busy listening to the 10,000 or so records that hit the shelves every year to play a video game. Now, it is only a matter of time before Rob Zombie's "Dragula" gets some type of gaming-music lifetime achievement award. [Gamasutra]

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