The Xcom 2012 Interactive Campaign Updated

There is very little difference between the process of developing sources in Games Journalism and that of journalism in its other forms. It begins with human sources who, when you are fortunate, can be pumped for information that is not part of the public domain, and then moves to fact finding in the form of diffing through records -- public if you are ethical, private if you are not -- in order to find clues that might be used to pry even more information from a source, or more likely, that can be linked together to add up in total to more than they do separately.

In the Internet era the process has come to include some unlikely avenues, including the web, Domain records, and blogs public and private that belong to the people that make games. Sometimes mistakes get made, and information that is not intended for public consumption gets posted to blogs, and such was the case during the early development of the DLC expansions for Fallout: New Vegas. Sadly, we cannot count on that to happen every day, so we have to make as much from the inadvertent and the intentional while trying not to speculate too much.

Taking that into consideration, among the many odd pastimes for Games Journos in search of news about an upcoming games in this modern era is the process of trolling through the records of the Name Servers that are associated with a game studio or publisher -- a tactic that is widely considered to be fertile ground, and often results in revealing information. While in the process of looking for anything that we could find on Grand Theft Auto 5, we found some websites that have been put up in preparation for the release of another Take Two related game, Xcom.