Been field testing new equipment around Austin lately, so check me out. Latest update: Amy Sage and Mike Boyd of Fiesta Explosion, covering “Game of Love” by Santana. Taken with a Flip Ultra 30-minute model, uploaded with my MSI Wind U123.

Short version: I got to spend an hour playing an unreleased game for the Nintendo Wii developed by a small startup studio in Austin, for the purpose of late-stage fine-tuning. And anyone in the Austin area with an interest and ability to not be a total jerk can, too. Read on for more.

Continue reading I pretended to be a legitimate game tester, and you can too…

There you go.

My editors come up with the headlines for these things.

Oh, and happy 9/11. Don’t blow up nothin’.

Last night I went to the latest open house for Austin Community College’s game development program. It was much the same as last year, with plenty of well-meaning but clueless people of all ages curious about what game development education was all about. Most of them seemed to have checked any notion that they had found a secret entrance to a glamour job at the door, thankfully, and coordinator Bob McGoldrick had further polished his pitch.

More interesting was the news that ACC is close to offering associate’s degrees in game programming and game design. Details are still sketchy about who this will be aimed at and whether credits earned toward what was originally just a non-degree certificate program, but this would already mean that proper financial aid could soon be available for game development study there. In other words, people could take out student loans to learn to make video games.

Killer. I’m probably going to be taking a class there in the fall, my third so far. Not that I needed to hear the spiel, really, but it’s always fun to go just to see who shows up. (One showed up that I didn’t expect to see. Probably no one you people know, but she’s apparently local to Austin now, moved in from Ohio. I was stoked.)

I won a Guildwars T-shirt in a drawing, too. More bonus.

Booyah. I didn’t pick out the screenshots, but at least someone did. It’d be boring without visuals. I also wrote this almost a month ago, but it took this long to work through Gama’s enormous backlog of features. I’m not complaining — Monday releases are prime time.

Jake Song is probably the least guarded and the most open game studio head I’ve ever met, or at least he seems to be. Made it an easy interview, although his honesty might surprise you. It did me.

Deep background: I went into the interview with two things in mind: one, if your career is defined at least in popular culture by one of the biggest games of all time, where do you go from there; and two, given the “too many cooks in the kitchen” analogy cited in the article, was Jake one of the cooks?

You figure out if I got answers to those.

Ian Frazier, quoted as Tiberius Moongazer, was the project lead for Ultima V: Lazarus, was interviewed by the newly-reformed RPGWatch (RPGDot’s editorial staff decided the management sucked and decided to bail.) What isn’t pointed out is that Ian works at Iron Lore Entertainment and was a designer on Titan Quest.

Perhaps the greatest surprise for me was the sheer amount of people who actually downloaded the final game—by the last estimate, somewhere in the vicinity of 60,000 people downloaded Lazarus. For a 500 MB download, which mostly only appeals to veterans of a now-long-dead game series, which requires a 3-year-old game (Dungeon Siege) to even run, I was astounded by our success. It was certainly good to see!

I think he’s being conservative on that estimate, because that was BitTorrented a whole lot, and those are harder to keep track of.

Here’s the remainder of my good AGC photos. I got lots of backs of heads and other such. A week later, I just want to get on with everything else in my life, and that is a lot. Had fun, was disturbed by more than a few things, got really down on myself for no one else’s fault but my own, and came out feeling only somewhat OK.

Anyway. Includes the IGDA-Austin shindig at Beerland with Guitar Hero 2. Captions in parentheses.
Continue reading Views from AGC…

Yeah, I know all about Steve Irwin. Nature is a horrible psychotic bitch, right? Forget conservation now. Fuck the ocean, and all of Australian wildlife. Just watch it all get paved over now. There’s no one left to stop it.

Anyway, back in Texas, Nellie Connally died. First Lady of Texas, wife of John Connally? Rode in the front seat with JFK and Jackie? Managed to not get shot? Yeah, she died.

And Rob Pardo’s going to be starting his keynote speech at the same time her funeral begins, Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. And First United Methodist isn’t that far away from the convention center.

Better get your parking space early.

Stinky Wizzleteats is apparently the new spokestoon for Sara Lee. And if you don’t know what that means, you probably shouldn’t be reading this site.

Getting ready for AGC as much as I can this week. Still haven’t made any appointments with the trainloads of game industry flacks wanting interviews. That’s still very weird for me, and it might turn out that I don’t do any at all — I’ll just go to the seminars. But we’ll see what happens. Gamasutra is sending at least three other people for coverage besides me, two of whom are going to be presenting at different times. Which is to say, they’re lots more important than I am and are likely to wonder who I am and what the hell I’m doing there.

To which I’ll probably reach into the gimme tote bag full of flyers that everyone registered gets, pull out the latest Game Writers Quarterly and turn to the third mug shot on page 2. Which doesn’t look that much like me, because I got new glasses in the past year and am wearing my hair shorter.

Please, just let me get through the week without making an ass of myself.

In about 10 minutes or so, I’m going to be up in front of a class talking about couch potatoes in space.

It’s a game. It’s for a grade. I brought real potatoes as visual aids. I also brought a rutabaga.

This will be the best Christmas ever.

Edit: I made it through, rutabaga and all. I even got a certificate for my troubles.

Now I gotta remind myself of why I did this class in the first place. That might take me a while. If I seem stupid, you’ll know why.

Edit 2: After riding around face down on my front passenger seat for a day, my certificate went into the cardboard box on the tall shelf near my breakfast nook. The box where I keep my Shadowbane strategy guides. Seems a safe enough place for it.

Still feeling stupid. Taquitos and mango salsa did nothing.