So the story goes, police go to serve a warrant on a guy for parole violation, find him sleeping in his car, guy bolts, runs across a highway overpass to a workforce center (they teach resume seminars and try to get people jobs,) barges in and is spotted climbing into the false ceiling through the tiles, possibly into the ventilation ducts from there.

Cops take all day to find him and get him out, and tear hell out of the ceiling tiles getting to him.

Edit: Here’s one view of the damage. Nice rotunda inside.

A few things about what is likely to be the next big sleeper-hit game phenomenon when it comes out later this fall (and if you need pointers, check out the fan-made songlist preview and for excitement, the official non-gameplay high-gloss trailer.) High hopes all around, folks, but there’s still a few obvious bumps on the highway to glory.
Continue reading Rock Band…

This is probably some of the worst news I’ve heard in a long time. The newspaper reporter in me wants to wait until it’s been verified by something other than the Internet, but, well, there’s more than one source for the memorial wishes there.

John Watson was a former Origin Systems employee, who started as a tester and earned credits programming, designing, writing and in at least one case contributing artwork to Ultimas 7 and 8, Crusader: No Remorse, Wing Commander II and Ultima Online, among other projects. I’d known he was part of a startup team that included Ragnar Scheuermann and Chris L’Etoile working on an MMO called 9th Dominion, but I’d lost track of him after that. According to his last resume, he’d gone on to The Collective to work on Getting Up for Atari and Marc Ecko. He’d apparently been wanting to come back to Austin for yet another startup project with friends.

While we were all at the fundraiser for the UT Videogame Archive last week, just before the Austin GDC started, John Watson was apparently killing himself with sleeping pills.

I never got to meet the guy.

And I don’t think I have anything else to say about it.

There you go.

My editors come up with the headlines for these things.

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

Just filed my report for a certain major gaming Webzine on the Women In Games International (and it is permissible to say “wiggy”) meet in Austin on Saturday. It ran a little long, I had to leave a bunch of stuff out, I got distracted again, I had to go to my day job…

And then I had to find this on Nicktoons this morning, several early episodes in a row, in fact. I can’t explain why I watched three in a row, including the pilot, but maybe I was just in a forgiving mood. Once you get past the fact that Kappa Mikey looks really bad, that is to say cheap as hell and shameless, and is meant to, it has a seriously infectious charm. It’s just that I’m still hung up about admitting that, even to you Intarwub nerds.

The premise of the show is that a kid from Cleveland, Mikey, who wants to be an actor but isn’t especially talented, gets a random chance from a scratch-off ticket to star in LilyMu, a Japanese TV show. Only when he gets to Japan, he finds that in “reality,” the country is some bizarre amalgam of every awful Japanese cartoon series that has washed up on American shores in the past 20-odd years. Girls with blue hair, giant robots and monsters, super-exaggerated social mores and emotional reactions, all that and a little talking purple chinchilla who might just be a guy in a suit, but no one knows for sure. And the show he stars in is pretty much every Japanese super-group show stereotype run through a blender. Except that since Mikey’s an American, he doesn’t have all the weird Japanese cartoon emotive tricks like sweatdrops and super-deformity.

A more perfect send-up of every god-awful anime Americans have had to suffer through for the sake of the freak crowd not committing self-sacrifice, as well as every American cartoon production going out of its way to look like they came from Japan (though they were probably animated in Korea anyway) could not be devised. At least, nothing this subtle. Once the initial sting of watching terrible Flash animation wears off, this is definitely worth watching. They even got a real j-rock band to do the opening title.

Anyway, hopefully the WiGI article will be up sometime soon. I’m sure you’ll all find something to watch.

• Fridays are always slow. No parties, people get anxious to get home and the event organizers want everyone packed up and gone.
• Caught the tail end of the panel with Jacobs, Koster, Bethke, Blakely and Firor. Boy, it’s a good thing there’s mutual respect there.
• Also witnessed the guy from GarageGames, Sheri Graner Ray and Kain Shin be really really nice to people making 60-second elevator pitches for their games. I did not expect that. Bonus: Only about half of them had nebulous catch-all cross-genre sandboxes, and one or two had a few that could actually be fun.
• I’ll be going back to the convention center tomorrow morning to cover the WIGI endcap for Gamasutra, and skipping the first of my new classes to catch the morning address by the lady who made Centipede.
• The real fun came later. Went to see Shoot ‘em Up, the new balls-out cartoony violence movie, at the Alamo Drafthouse. Took Jinx from the Fragdolls, and yes we are friends and yes she’s on the cover of the new PCXL, neener neener. Finally met Brandon Reinhart outside; he’d gone with Damion and Sara. Reminded him that we’re both from Topeka, though we’d gone to different high schools. I was a Trojan, he was Charger.
• More later.

• I lost my camera. Good news is, I ran into a guy who I only recognized as sitting next to me at the Writing the Bioware Way talk (good, instructive, encouraging that we did most everything on Lazarus that they do, but they were lots more experienced at it, had more voice acting, closeup character views, etc.) at a post-session party and he said he turned it in. So hopefully I can pick it up. Thanks, guy, whoever you are. Honesty is the first virtue. (edit: Got it back, yay!)
• The Habbo Hotel talk was also very instructive, especially about how the guy hates the term “user generated content.” Yeah, because users aren’t generators, and most of them aren’t really that creative, but the tools they give are enough for a few to make cool stuff, and that’s pretty much all there is to do besides socialize and explore other people’s cool stuff — and they’ve been at it for seven years now. The user-created room soundtracks sound sort of cool and sort of scary. I resisted the urge to talk like a Geno. He did talk about “furni,” but not really about ” bobba.”
• Craig Fryar of Online Alchemy in Austin gave a talk on acquiring funding for MMOs, which I might write up properly once I have my notes organized. I went because I hadn’t heard him talk in nearly three years, and came back with shots of a video for “R20: The Roaring 2120’s,” which is apparently going to be their MMO project.
• Damion Schubert gave an excellent speech, but Gamasutra didn’t cover it. I guess I’ll have to here, but you’ll have to wait for it. Yeah, you could read Next-Gen’s. (edit: Raph has a liveblog of it that’s pretty complete. I can’t pretend to type that fast.) (edit 2: Slashdot Games got it, too. Maybe I don’t need to after all.)
• The swag was awesome. I got a Midway-branded pizza cutter, an Insomniac slinky, a Foundation 9 squeeze bottle, Disney Online and Lord of the Rings Online t-shirts, Bioware pen and pad, a Ghost Widow (from City of Villains) HeroClix figure and the first three issues of the Top Cow-produced and Mark Waid-written City of Heroes comic book, several pens and mints and some other stuff I forget about because it’s in my trunk right now and I’m really tired.
• Feeling pretty good about it all. Got people to mail before I bail.

• My head hurt a lot last night. Better today, but I think I need to either carry my laptop bag around less, or carry it more in the off-season.
• They’re not going to have lectures in tiny Room 1, which was designated for the Business track yesterday. Overcrowding was the reason I missed Gordon Walton’s speech. I was there for Raph Koster’s speech upstairs, but I had to be a fire hazard, sitting on the floor to learn how game designers need to be looking to Kings of Chaos and HotorNot instead of WoW. I’m wondering how many more years this conference has in the Austin Convention Center with all the room space they don’t have, but where else in Austin are they going to have it?
• They picked a bigger room on the mezzanine for the press, which is great, though at least a couple news organizations (so far, of which I’ve been aware) didn’t know it was here. And they have coffee, but no danish. I must suffer the long lines at the Starbucks booth with the other mortals.
• Had a grand time at Creekside Lounge last night. It’s a relatively new bar, only one year old, and they had one wall for projecting Guitar Hero II battles. (I personally beat two people who had never played it before, on Medium. Hey, I don’t play it anywhere other than in GameStops, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone that.) Hung out with the likes of Toby, Sara, Will, Damion, Tre, Everett and Jeff and laughed a lot. I’m sure you know them, too.
• Disturbed by more speakers than I care to admit here. See previous entry for the only one I think I will admit. The rest are best for the back rooms and whispers.
• I’m having a lot more fun with the idea that I’m not obligated to file stories for anyone, than I thought I was going to have. Not having an editor bugs me, though.
• The expo room is open today. I’m already late for the second day’s keynote. We’ll see if I go.
• Anyone reading this from the con, open your gimme-bag and check out the Game Writers Quarterly for the fall.

Blizzard’s president and co-founder Mike Morhaime referred to the term “MMORPG” twice in his keynote speech today.

He pronounced it “morgue.”

This is a guy whose company made the biggest video game cultural phenomenon in world history, and he refers to its genre with the sound of a term generally used to describe a place where you stash dead bodies.

More to come…

Hadn’t planned on going before Sunday, but there I was, slogging through the mud and having a grand old time. Check GameSetWatch tomorrow sometime, my report should be there once Simon sifts through it and corrects all my flubs.

And off to AGDC I go in the morning. Lordy, lordy, lordy B.

Edit: Here’s the report.