Marek

Hey, cool, not such a long shot then. Do you know Lev or Barbara over there? Good people.

I would put all my money on the latter. If there were some kind of DFAN-based betting pool, of course.

It was just a general statement in support of Kieron Gillen.

Gillen is a very good writer and it's unfortunate that the NGJ thing got misinterpreted so badly and bit him in the ass.

Hang on. Do you know a game company called Avaloop? (Long shot. Just curious.)

Gamesindustry.biz has a nice column up written by Colin Anderson of Denki titled "Dawn of the age of development". I've actually been meaning to write something similar. It feels like there's something different in the air right now. Although I would have never used interactive TV as an example, I really agree with the overall sentiment of the article. Check it out: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=18798

Most of the time I design (and sometimes help program) a browser-based 3D mini-MMO project that we're building internally with a small team at the company I work at. It's really really cool. I also do design doc stuff for other projects we do for external clients, most recently an advergame for a brand of running shoes, and a bunch of community-based minigames for an energy drink.

After seeing the 1UP Show preview of Dead Rising I want a 360 (also for XBLA Wednesdays). I loved the bit where they drove a car through a parking garage and scooped up literally hundreds of zombies.

Just watched The Mighty Boosh s2 (which Nick showed at Spaff's like half a year ago now I think?) and it's really good if you enjoy surreal humor. s1 seems to be utter shit so far though.

Well, erm ... then you could just name it Beyond Good & Evil 2 and pretend there was a first one. What I mean is that the first game creates a little buzz, maybe lands in the bargain bin, etc. The people who play it will then be the first adoptors and evangelizers of the sequel.

The consensus amongst industry folks (at least ones that I talk with) is that "innovative" is fine but "weird" is bad. It's too easy for people to say "uhh this is weird" and not bother. The way to get away with things is to hide cool shit in a seemingly conventional game. I hear what the guy is saying in that article but I'm still going to blame this on PR (and the timing of the release). I know that UbiSoft really made an effort in advertising BG&E, but I think the industry in general is really bad at marketing this type of game (in which the world and the characters and the overall concept are the hooks, not what other games it's comparable to, or that it's "for fans of X", or that it has some unique gameplay features). I've looked at marketing documents for a few games and most of them show pie charts of how many "fans of [sport X] [movie Y] [theme Z]" they think exist in each territory and how much percent of that audience they think they can capture. Games like BG&E work a bit differently. They can't piggyback on a known existing audience. Same with Katamari Damacy. It didn't get any proper marketing either but it got lucky. Some people ran with it and unknowingly gave birth to a small internet meme. Katamari is in some ways the Snakes on a Plane of gaming. EVERYONE knows about Katamari... they usually don't know the name but they know about "that crazy game with the sticky ball I heard about from a friend who read about it on a blog". The videos of Rayman and the rabbids doing random things are a step in the right direction. It's selling the characters and the world, not the game or its mechanics. Everyone knows about this weird game and knows that it has funny rabbits in it. There's a build-up of buzz and if Ubisoft plays its cards right this game is going to be a big success, and it will be only partly because it's a Rayman sequel. Or, you can take a page from the Ron Gilbert book, and use your first game as an elaborate advertisement for the sequels. He talked about BG&E in that interview on Thumb and said that what UbiSoft should have done was hit people with BG&E2 and 3. They'd likely be a big success because of the BG&E fanbase that now exists. He said the first Freddy Fish game sold badly but as they created more of them and the character became more recognized the series started selling shitloads. By the way, the oneliner for BG&E is "an action/adventure in which you uncover an alien conspiracy".

Today I went to this company that's doing graphics on a game I'm working on and we had a meeting there and we were discussing various character designs and when it came to discussing this army general character someone suggested using this crazy moustached general who actually existed as a reference so we typed his name into google and we clicked on the first image and it was your timisgod site. Why was there a picture of a crazy moustached general on your site?

It was on GC. (And PS2. And PC. And Xbox.) I don't see what making it a GC exclusive would have accomplished other than cutting sales for the other platforms.

Yeah he was already with Valve around the time he and Tim received the GDC award for Best Writing.

Look, I know I really supported Wii in the past, but all that excitement made me forget I had some standards. I mean, 32-kilobyte 8-way set-associative L1 instruction cache??? Yes, that's EIGHT WAY! Plz. I won't be able to play any games because all the time I'll be thinking about that 32-kilobyte 8-way set-associative L1 instruction cache and shaking my head. Fuck it, I'm buying a PS3.

"The graphics are really a potpourri of thumbs..." Yeah, I can see that work. Dude.

How many chapters are there?

Reviews that explain how the game feels and how it's experienced should not be limited to just indie sites. Major movie reviewers do the same thing. Roger Ebert is practically the anti-GameSpot.

Well in that case it might be fun to go to a few big events just to check out the atmosphere. I'd personally recommend going to a summer festival of some kind though.

5 days off was awesome. At least the one night we were there.

Ah I see. well, the target audience for Sensation (particularly the white edition) leans more towards people who don't go to such things very often. A large number of people who go there belong more to the bar crowd or get their electronic music from TMF and MTV. The music is relatively commercial, and there's more emphasis on the dancers and the spectacle than the DJs. It's kind of the Mickey Mouse event of electronic music. Dance Valley or Awakenings are much more deserving of the "mecca" label. You might still like it but it depends on what type of music you enjoy. I've been mostly avoiding large events though. They're usually expensive and erm not that good. The best place to enjoy electronic music is in a cool intimate club with a few hundred people instead of thousands upon thousands.

Be honest now.

Heh nope, I'm not at all attracted to that event. Did you go there?

It's about a stick figure that becomes sentient and starts exploring the real world. http://www.jeuxvideo.tv/drawn-to-be-alive-video-22195.html http://www.drawntobealive.com/ http://news.moddb.com/17874/dtba-news-and-gameplay-video/ Pretty cool.

I'm interested in the answer to that as well. I really like the political side of the later seasons of Deep Space Nine, and obviously Battlestar Galactica. Apparently Babylon 5 has that going for it as well. Are all the seasons good though? I saw some early episodes years ago and it didn't really hook me.