Marek

The name Jake reminds me of a dog. A realistically animated one.

Yes but don't buy BG&E in Holland (like I did). They're misprints from December. Bastards.

Although I haven't played Ghost Master (just the demo), it apparently has around 80% on gamerankings.

There's quite a bunch of English people here. In fact, half the Idle Thumbs staff is from the UK.

Ah yes, but we do have this.

Haarlem Double-A!! Let me be your virtual tourguide using pictures lazily taken from Google. Ysbreker lives here too, by the way. "Haarlem (population 150,000) is a city in the west of the Netherlands, capital of the North Holland province. The city is located at the river Spaarne, close to the North Sea." "In 1658 Dutchman Peter Stuyvesant founded the city Nieuw Haarlem ('New Haarlem') at the eastside of North America. Later this was to give its name to the Harlem neighborhood in New York City, United States." This is not a mosque (like one train passenger once wondered). It's actually a prison called The Dome. Haarlem has the most awesome train station ever. It's often used in movies. It will feature in the upcoming Ocean's Twelve, though it will probably double for the less awesome Amsterdam station. Haarlem Station has a sort of Rubacava thing going on. I love it. A big church conveniently named The Big Church. The main square, aka The Big Market. By the way, the main shopping street that connects to this is called De Grote Houtstraat (The Big Woodstreet). I guess my forefathers liked the word Big. The Toneelschuur, the theatre / alternative movies place. Their new building was designed by a cartoonist, and it's a reaaaally cool design. I could be in that building forever. The colors, the textures, the light ... it's all extremely awesome. Haarlem is also close to the Hekslootpolder, a tiny nature reserve near where I live: The city is in the background. Yes, it actually can look this pretty over there. The place is also full of birds (some rare ones too) and fish and foxes and whatever. It's like a whole wildlife reserve is crammed into a tiny piece of land. Haarlem is also quite near the beach, where awesome free parties were held in the summer every year. Except now it's been reamed by commercial interests, and it probably won't be the same now. GRRRR. This ends the tour. Don't forget your guide on the way out.

Check out this game: http://www.alienhominid.com/ It's sort of like ... Metal Slug ... meets ... something else. It's a console game with 2D cartoon graphics. See the gameplay video. It looks like a lot of fun.

The game is to be published by 0~3, by the way. (Surely I can't pass an opportunity to link to that boring news report that no one read because the site wasn't online at the time of writing.)

GameSpot recently called them up and they got an answering machine, leading them to file the rumors of the closure under "bogus". As your link shows that was a bit of a quick assumption.

Okay, let's get a thread started with crazy games you may have forgotten about. How about Z? Basically, it was an RTS game like Command & Conquer, except much more fast-paced and without any resource gathering. There were a bunch of zones that you had to control, so you had to use blitzkrieg tactics pretty much all the time. Too bad the game had terrible graphics or it might have been noticed more. I think it actually came out in 1996 even though it looks like a game from 1990. (Dunno if 1996 is "retro" enough. Probably not. Whatever.)

Dominion was bought off another developer. Ion Storm thought they could raise themselves some quick cash by finishing it as a sideproject. However, it took much longer than expected, and ended up not selling well at all.

We built it so the rest of our country seems bigger. Okay, so here's an actual Dutch tradition that took place last night. It's called Luilak (Lazybones). On the Saturday before Whit Sunday (Pentecost), kids get up really early in the morning to make loud noises to wake people up. The official reason is to get people to go to the nightly Luilak market, but the unofficial reason is to just annoy people for no reason. The tradition gradually mutated over the years, so mild vandalism (using wax or soap to write on windows) and random fucking around are more important now. Apparently things are not as fun for kids as it used to be, now that people disconnect their doorbells and put some kind of stuff on the windows that makes it easy to wash stuff off.

(off topic)

Here's a nice cultural difference for ya. In Holland, it's called midgetgolf. Sorry.

His name is Spaff.

Click.

(We can always hope.) For my exclusive impressions of the Unreal 3 demo go here.

I don't know for sure, I'm just guessing he is. It makes sense, unless he was majorly bummed in the Atari deal.

I agree that GameSpot's video stuff runs smooth as butter. I just felt dissapointed when the blurb said something like "The lead developers behind game XYZ talks about the inspiration behind his game!" and then it just ends up being just like the press release except in slightly different words. They should ask better questions during their video interviews. I only saw two really great videos while I had GameSpot Complete and they were really just the wacky ones. One was where that Nevarro guy does a "cribs" segment on his crappy home, and in another one Kasavin schmoozes unsuccesfully at a press party and gets drunk (great deadpan humor in that one).

Harsh? How so? Ron and Shelley Day sold Humongous, a very succesful company, to Atari. Ron's kids games are great. I'm just saying he's not shown a huge interest in going back to games for "grown ups". Of course, I would be a happy man if he started something new along the lines of Cavedog.

... who would then proceed to making Bingy and Bongy VI: Treasure on Treasure Island and become an ever richer man.

I was briefly a subscriber, discovered that all their developer video interviews are actually boring, and then unsubscribed.

Shit...

Yes, we all know that you do all the work at Double Fine.

Oh man, hahaha. That's a Dutch song by Uncle Henk ("Ome Henk" is a series of CDs and comic books with distinctly pubescent humor). The actual refrain is: "Do you know what I want? / an inflatable crocodile / to drift at sea / among all those hot chicks"