There is already a surprisingly elaborate browser game for Deadliest Catch, a television program where men risk their lives trying to outsmart crabs. The show has no right being as entertaining as it is, and the more we thought about an retail game based on it the more enthusiastic we became. This is true, and I wish we had recorded the conversation: all strip progress halted for forty-five minutes while we indulged in the creation of co-operative, asymmetrically competitive structures that would support the theme. The hook is very similar to Iron Dukes actually, the only distinction being that the treasure one hauls up is not gold, but is instead a prison full of delicious animals.

I am sure you have already seen these, but I'm not so sure that I could - in good conscience - keep them to myself.

(CW)TB
 

A week or so ago, I read over Stephen Totilo's off the cuff interview with Cliff Bleszinski, who is also known as CliffyB, and is still sometimes called Clefairy B. In it, Clifford makes a few personal observations about the PC as a gaming platform - namely, that it is schizophrenic in its focus. The industry itself apparently agrees, but it hasn't spared him any heat. Epic's Liar-King Mark Rein scuttled out from a rotting log to do some damage control, but noone on the Internet remembers anything for more than a week anyhow. It's wasted effort.

Just a reminder, tomorrow night is Pokemon night at the Comic Stop. We start at 6pm and go to 8pm. Bring your deck and any extra cards if you want to trade. New players are welcome, just pick up a starter deck.

-Gabe out

So I need to apologize her to Ted Mathot for a mistake I made with some concept art for our game. If that doesn't sound interesting to you feel free to stop reading now.

We started working on the game back in 2006 and at the beginning obviously I had no idea what it would like like. Whenever we start a new project I start by looking around for some kind of inspiration. In the case of our game it was one image. The cover to a comic book called Rose and Isabel. It had the exact pallet and "feel" that I though would be good for the game. So I sat down a did the very first piece of art with Gabe and Tycho and FF Prime in the background. I used the pallet and even the composition from the Rose and Isabel cover. When it came to do the ruble I couldn't get it right.  My rocks looked like shit and I loved the way he did his. So I used them. In my head this piece was just something to kick start the project, to supply a direction and help visualize the world.

It might not make sense but I had to do that piece before I could do my own pieces like the one below. I realise they are not very similar but in my head there is a direct connection between the two. I could not have gotten the one without first doing the other.

We were threshing GDC news when we came across a LEGO Universe article, and when I say "article" of course I mean "the most rudimentary kind of impressions," because I don't think they're ready to let people really see the guts of this thing. Flynn's interview at Kotaku has a few more details, I'm not sure how much there is to know - but none of this has stopped me from building a nest for it in my heart of hearts. The only advice I would give NetDevil at this point is to maybe beef up their stock of community managers.

We decided to try a few shirts in alternate color schemes.  People seem to like the black ones best, but who knows?  Maybe we just haven't made the right ones.  See if any of these do anything for ya. 

Fuck the shock mouse. Fuck him in hell, forever.

It's hard to imagine not having access to a deep reservoir of supernatural knowledge to enrich and inform my daily life. As early as age thirteen I was already curating a collection of incredible facts, highly granular assessments of wicked and ancient lizards, up to and including notes on their diet, sleep habits, and taste in home decor. From the demure to the diabolical, I have sought to build a robust profile of the hidden world. My very mind is an arsenal.

New one's up, for last week's "The Spore Cult."  Feed is here. 

(CW)TB
 

Sorry about that.  Kiko digests the audio files for that, and I forgot that there President's Day was a holiday that people took seriously.  Before today, I was not aware just how seriously Kiko took the concept of presidency. 

Also, I fixed an offensive and aggressively stupid typographical error in the post above.  Now, it's only aggressively stupid in the ways I originally intended.

(CW)TB

In case you were wondering, here is your comprehensive assessment of Gabriel's mental health. As someone who has endured him for many years, I believe I can continue to do so. The muscles in his face seem to tighten less often.  The only real trouble with his pharmaceutically enforced zen is that I feel much, much crazier by comparison.

I'm aware of Spore, but it's not a game I look around for in an active mode. Here is a preview of the game, for example, but I haven't read it so I don't know if it's good or not. I'm especially disinclined to read previews in particular, because I think it's a game that is likely to preview well. You aren't likely get past the novelty stage in am Official Press context - it's going to be pure discovery from beginning to end, wall to wall tendrils and eye stalks, ginning up hobbling quintapeds whose journey to the mailbox is difficult, if not impossible. The incredible outpourings of support for the game are themselves incredible to me, but what they've done is try to create a product whose potential is as raw as possible. We seem to value that ethereal quantity differently than most.

Unlike most "adventure" games, whose puzzle mechanics are heavily rooted in inventory management, Professor Layton's puzzles are more like... puzzles. It's more Myst than Maniac Mansion. It's true that I've only done about twenty puzzles, so I don't know the game in its entirety. Even so, I don't think you're ever going to be putting different fluids in balloons so you can put them in a mail tube so you can flood a communications room so you can etcetera.

We're playing Pokemon (the TCG) Tuesday the 12th at the Comic Stop. We got off schedule because of a Magic tournament last week but we're back at the regular time starting tomorrow. We'll start the matches as close to 6pm as possible. New players are always welcome.

The latest copy of EGM arrived at the office today. Apparently their adologists have finally broken the single cover barrier. It used to be that magazines only had one cover to sell but now EGM comes with a second cover pasted over the real cover like some kind of shell. It says "your favorite magazine starts inside" up at the top of this new cover cover. Unless you consider ads to be content this statement isn't very accurate. I guess "your favorite magazine starts in eleven pages" doesn't have the same ring to it.

-Gabe out

It is often the case that we are jumped by four or five horde ten levels higher than us. This is often because we've jumped a friend of theirs, ten levels lower than us, as retribution for some earlier act of aggression, in slavish iteration of a behavior that has - as its culmination - the end of all life, everywhere. Kara marveled that Gabriel and I were able to escape these confrontations with such regularity. What was our secret? "Fear," I said, bending the microphone closer. "Fear, and selfishness."