Some really good meetings with folks from the Redmond arm of things today.  Yeah, I know, all this process stuff is boring but what can I say, I'm a process geek!  As an organization we're definitely learning better how to use the knowledge and resources of the folks up there to augment our process here at Ensemble.  In this particular case it was figuring out ways to tap some of the resources that are very useful to the MGS third-party publishing arm to share that same knowledge with first-party houses like Ensemble.

It's kind of weird thinking of ourselves as first party for platforms like XP and Vista -- our culture is still really different from the typical internal MS team.  But it's really not a bad way of looking at it.  My brain always associates first party with folks like Miyamoto or Team Sonic (back in the day), so not too bad company to be in...