Happy Halloween to you all!  Since we moved out of deep suburbia (into, well, urbia) we don't get quite the same flood of trick-or-treaters that we used to.  Honestly it used to be quite insane, easily several hundred children.  Now it is a much more moderate flow.  The boys had a great deal of fun drawing faces on "ghost pumpkins" (some kind of albino pumpkin we saw at the store) and making jack-o-lanterns out of them.  This was Xander's first real Halloween and both boys had a lot of fun doing the rounds of the neighborhood, although a cold front kept the festivities short.

I really like the idea of Halloween but I never seem to prepare enough for it in advance... the closest thing I came to spooky sounds for trick-or-treaters arriving at our door was playing DOOM on Xbox Live Arcade and turning the volume way up...

There's usually a pumpkin carving contest at work, which is neat because we have a lot of talented artists.  This year someone did a pumpkin version of the Age 3 "Claim It" ads, making a pumpkin globe and sticking a knife in North America...  my favorite, though, was that one of our artists replaced an in-game armor upgrade with a jack-o-lantern head, which was quite amusing to see... :)

The local Gamestop is selling Final Fantasy XII at midnight tonight, and I plan on being there.  It's getting great reviews though of course I would be getting the latest FF game no matter what the reviews. 

There is always a kind of expectation game with releases like this that I'm really excited about.  I don't want to get too disappointed but it's hard when I see perfect Famitsu scores...

Normally I'd be doing my Monday night raids right now instead of posting here, but we ventured into Naxxramas for the first time tonight and the server doesn't seem to think that's such a great idea.

A friend of mine recently turned me on to the webcomic "Order of the Stick", (you can read it from the start here).  It's quite a funny take on table top gaming, and I've been steadily reading through them, quite often laughing out loud.  Good stuff.  It is amazing how much meta-humor content there is out there relating to games, especially the various MMOs like World of Warcraft.  Of course, not all that much of it is good, which is what makes OOTS quite remarkable.

I don't think it's as popular now but I definitely remember a time where "Agetoons" were popular among the fan community, especially at Age of Empires Heaven.  Basically humorous screenshots (usually hand created with the editor), photoshopped in to make a joke.  As Sturgeon's Law dictates, most of it was crap.  But there were a few humorous ones, and it always struck me as interesting the way our game content would be repurposed in such a fashion.  Nowadays I listen to mashups on the radio and see photoshop every night on the Daily Show, so it's hardly unique... but still interesting to see.  In fact, I suppose one could make the argument that exploring a game universe in a new direction like Halo Wars is the same basic concept...

Gwog mentions in the comments that I play an awful lot of games.  I definitely think I have some kind of gamer's ADHD.  It is certainly true that I try to have at least played some of almost every major game (with a few exceptions -- I generally just don't have the time & energy for all the sports games out there).  This has given me a pretty vast array of information about game mechanics, game content, mission, etc. which actually serves me pretty well as a game developer.  There is always a lot to learn from playing other games, even if they are less than stellar but I'll certainly admit that's not my primary motivation.  I'd finish a lot fewer games if my goal was just to maintain a kind of census of the games out there.

Actually I finish a lot fewer games these days than I used to.  Especially really lengthy games, like RPGs, which also suffer from the fact that I most enjoy the early part of most RPGs, when the mechanics are fresh.  A short, but high quality game is really at the top of the list for me, though I still like to go really deep on games when I can (witness my ongoing obsession with GTA San Andreas).  So I'll happily finish Dead Rising or Saints Row, but Oblivion, as good as it is, continues to languish with me somewhere halfway through the tremendous amount of content in that game.  I keep telling myself I'll go back to finish the Achievements in games like Dead Rising or Saints Row to really, fully, complete them, but I'm not really sure how true that is...

It is painfully clear to me that the rate at which games I really want to play are coming out is exceeding the rate at which I can possibly play them.  I'm still largely in denial over this mathematical reality...

The fall release flood is clearly upon us, but this time it seems to be hitting me particularly hard in strategy games.  I've barely scratched the surface of Dominions 3, and I already have World At War: A World Divided, Space Empires 5, Sid Meier's Railroads!, and Stronghold Legends sitting on the pile looking at me.  That's not even counting all the RTSes like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, DEFCON, and Sword of the Stars... or games like Anno 1701 and Supreme Commander that will be out shortly.

I'm constantly torn between trying them all out a little bit to see what's best, vs. pacing myself to keep the flow of "new" (to me).  Strategy games are particularly rough because they rarely have a finishing condition where I can achieve nice, clean, closure the way I can on something with a storyline...

Overall, a pretty good problem to have though.  :)

Heh, you know a game (in this case, World of Warcraft) is big when a 3 month delay of your expansion pack makes the headlines on all the major news sites.   I can't say that I'm at all surprised though... Blizzard doesn't have much of a reputation for shipping on time.  It's not as if Burning Crusade, with its sheer force of gravity, is forced into the holiday season for sales, and if attach rates of other MMO expansion packs are any guide they will sell a vast number of them no matter when they release.

Blizzard also has a reputation for putting quality ahead of schedule concerns.  I think this is a key element to most of the super blockbuster games out there.  I know that almost all of Ensemble's games had originally been internally planned for earlier dates, then readjusted once we got to the point of making realistic calls of how close we were to shipping.  As the saying goes, a game that is late, is late for a few months, but a game that sucks, sucks forever.  Blizzard may not ship with any kind of regular schedule, but they certainly don't suck.

That's why I'm so blown away by companies like Insomniac and Rockstar North... GTA: Vice City and R&C: Going Commando are two of my favorite games of the previous console generation and both were made in under a year of calendar time.  Amazing.

I've logged a few hours with Bully lately, the "GTA in a prep school" game from Rockstar (RS Vancouver, not RS North).  While it is certainly held back by its "PS2-ness", in the form of long load times, low resolution, and general graphical last-gen-ness, it is a very compelling experience.  The writing is actually pretty amusing, and some of the dialogue quite well written, at least by video game standards.  They are little more than caricature, but interesting caricatures nevertheless.  The voice acting for a few of the characters (like Gary) is extremely good, and adds a great deal to what's interesting about the story.

There are two things that really struck me about Bully:

First, I'm quite surprised how well the basic gameplay of GTA (sans the carjacking) carries over.  Minute-to-minute non-linearity in a lightly simulated world with emergent gameplay winds up being pretty compelling even in Bullworth Academy instead of Vice City. 

Second, there is a sense of "worldiness" that Bully captures that even a lot of other quite feature-competitive GTA-style games (Saint's Row, Godfather) really fail to capture.  I'm not sure whether this just comes from production quality, detail in the environment, or artistic style -- but Rockstar VC managed to capture it in a way that most games do not.

Bully of course is getting all sorts of attention for the political combination of GTA + schoolkids, but really there is nothing particularly violent or even worse than you see in a bad teen comedy.   There is a lot of fistfighting and generally cruel behavior, so I wouldn't exactly recommend it for a younger kid, but all the Jack Thompson style hype about this being incredibly destructive to society is pretty crazy.

I sure wish it were on the 360 though.

When we were acquired by Microsoft back in the day, I have to admit I had a lot of concerns about becoming part of "the man".  I certainly have to admit those fears were unfounded, due in very large part to the lengths that Ensemble's upper management has gone to in maintaining our independant culture.  But there are some very cool things that Microsoft does, I'm learning.  One is the "Microsoft Giving" campaign, where they match donations to local charities, such as the Dallas Children's Museum which is an absolute favorite of my boys.  It's a little perq that I never would have thought of even asking for at previous smaller companies, but a really nice one.  Not only is the actual monetary benefit nice for the charities, but they do a great job promoting the campaign for employees.  It put it on my radar, and it probably wouldn't have been otherwise.

So yay Microsoft, especially when we can use all their great benefits and they can leave us mostly alone to make great games for them.  :)

The War Chiefs expansion for Age of Empires 3 has hit pretty much all the main PC gaming venues now!  Our copies arrived today, and it is always great to finally get your hands on a shipped game, though my involvement in War Chiefs is admittedly fairly slight.  It's getting great reviews, which I'm quite pleased to see -- despite our commercial success Ensemble's games often get a drubbing in reviews.

You can download the trial version of the War Chiefs here if you're interested.

Good stuff... I expect to log some hours leveling up a new Native homecity this weekend.

Another week where more releases pile onto my lap faster than I can possibly hope to play them.  Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Bully are now on the pile, which mocks me mercilessly.  Meanwhile, as I go to the game store to pick up the various latest releases, my five-year-old son Xavier is thrilled to find a used copy of "Godzilla: Save the Earth" in some abandoned corner of the local Gamestop.  "Godzilla: Destroy All Monster Melee" is one of his favorite games currently... I guess he just likes giant monster fights.  As far as I can tell, G:StE is basically an identical game to G:DAMM, but that doesn't stop him from being incredibly excited about it...

We have a ritual around our house where as the boys want to do various things they have to provide "codes" -- this is our generic term for little pseudo-educational minigames they have to play with me to get what they want.  It started out as them needing to recite a "monster summoning code" when they wanted me to chase them around the house, which was something like counting to 10, but it has evolved into a general mechanism that includes spelling, addition and subtraction, etc.  Tonight's code was learning to write the word "Godzilla".  The boys are much more motivated when they like the subject matter....