The Good the Bad and the Ugly - 2007

I have picked a few games I have been playing recently, and am going to share with you, my loyal audience, what I thought of them. These are going to be quick and dirty reviews, for no other purpose than that I want to refrain myself from becoming too long winded in expressing my opinion.

Marianne would probably say that I should try that not only in this article, but also in regular conversations. Alas, I have yet to unlock that achievement.
By the way, you'll note from the platforms I played these games on, that I am firmly rooted in Microsoft's core audience: the thirty-something hard core gamer.

A fact I'd probably should not repeat outside of these pages.

Assassin's Creed (Xbox 360)
Good: The AC engine is beautiful to look at and controls wonderfully.
Bad: They try to obscure a lack of content by adding a plethora of repetetive side-missions.
Ugly: 1) "Interactive" cutscenes with way too much plot exposition 2) The plot

Mass Effect (Xbox 360)
Good: The ME engine is beautiful to look at.
Bad: Turn on auto-leveling and the game becomes Gears of War with a better story and a sub-par shoot / cover system.
Ugly: Inventory system makes baby jesus cry.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (Nintendo Wii)
Good: Coop mode!
Bad: Everything that sucked storywise over the course of the entire franchise is now yours to own in one game.
Ugly: Shake-your-Wiimote-to-dodge-the-next-killing-blow is b-r-o-k-e-n

Halo 3 (Xbox 360)
Good: More master Chief! More incredibly well-designed shooting action! Four player coop! Forge!
Bad: It's not the end of the series (DUH!)
Ugly: They should have retained the simple elegance of the story present in Halo 1: as it is, I don't understand jack about what's going on anymore. The excellent books written by Eric Nylund shame Halo 3's storyline.

Bioshock (Xbox 360)
Good: Steampunk meets Stanley Kubrick's The Shining? Weeeeeeeeeeee!
Bad: Carefully crafted and scripted events are absent from the latter part of the game, replaced by an uninspired endboss battle.
Ugly: The much heralded and advertised freedom to do anything, behave any way you want boils down to Light Side / Dark Side choices and 2 corresponding endings. So last gen!

Stranglehold (Xbox 360)
Good: It's Max Payne starring Chow Yun Fat.
Bad: The destroy-the-environment-to-take-out-enemies mechanic largely disappears after the first level of the game. That's right, the demo level that was on XBLA...Hmmmmm...
Ugly: It's Max Payne starring Chow Yun Fat.

Review of the Dead - Part 1

Currently I am reading a lot of zombie novels. I have a general fascination for quality suspense, and at present there is little that holds my interest when it comes to fantasy books.
These are the books that I have been reading:

Word War Z by Max Brooks
The Rising and City of the Dead by Brian Keene
Monster Island and Monster Nation by David Wellington
Dying to Live by Kim Pfaffenroth and D.L. Snell (editor)
Plague of the Dead by Z A Recht
Down the Road by Bowie Ibarra
--and Heart-shaped Box by Joe Hill, which isn't a zombie book per se, but which I will be talking about nevertheless.

Back to our zombie novels. What makes a good book about zombies? Gore? Rotting corpses? To a certain degree. In my opinion, good horror stories aren't necessarily about the supernatural specifically, but about characters. As long as the characters are interesting, their emotions and thoughts compelling, then there is a basis for a good scary story. Without interesting characters (fictional people we might deem "almost real", but care for nonetheless), any story--but specifically the horror story--falls flat on its face. That is the mistake they keep making with the Aliens franchise: the first two movies got it right in that regard, the others didn't.

Then there's a certain degree of genre conventions. Slasher films usually have one killer and a group of teenagers. It's the ten little indians cliche, with the sequence of deaths happening in the order of which sex, drugs and booze are being had by the youngsters.

Zombie stories are a bit like that. They also have certain conventions. First of all, they usually contain some sort of contemporary social commentary or a very critical look at ourselves as a society. It's also about creativity and adaptation: survival. This is key to the zombie story. Aliens and Ghosts for instance, in the classical sense, can't be outwitted by creative adaptations of our surroundings or the elements in it, because aliens and ghosts break certain rules that propel them into a different category. A ghost can shift through walls, Aliens can usually teleport or fly (unless they are in a M. Night Shyamalan movie, where Aliens can't even open a door), so they are scary in other ways and require different solutions.

Zombies are basically us, and to a certain degree, suffer from the same obstacles as we do. Where they differ from us is not what is scary. Personally, I find corpses to be either disgusting or a little bit sad (not as in pathetic, but I can get sad when I see one). Sure, a walking corpse is scary, but you can't write an entire story about it.

What you can write a story about however, is how specific people react to the situation of being trapped in a building, on a boat, or in a world that's being overrun by zombies. Sure, the zombies themselves do matter, as do the rules that the writer comes up with (Is their bite infectious or not? Are they fast or are they slow?), but in the end, they aren't the main characters. The survivors are. And whether this part of the story is interesting will make or break the entire story.

In the next part I will take a look at the individual books.

Dis my girlfrend. Not urs.

BBC defends games

Over on the BBC's website, Paul Rubens weighs in on the supposed threat of gaming to our society with this article, saying that it ain't so bad as some people would have us believe.

As far as I am concerned, the article could have focussed more on the world of games outside of Halo 3 and could have been longer, but hey, we need all the advocacy we can get. Good show.

Time marches on

Sometimes whole months can pass by without the realization sinking in that yes, another part of your life is gone and there have been many things that you wanted to do, but actually didn’t. I won’t go into the realm of the totally unbelievable by claiming that I didn’t have the time, rather, I was just too stinking lazy to update this blog. So there.

So yeah, uhm, stuff happened.

First of all, something that I knew a while back already, but haven’t deigned to write about (for fear of evil spirits jinxing the whole affair, I’m sure): I am going to be a daddy. Yes that’s right. Mr. Irresponsible is going to get a little diaper-worm of his own. A boy no less (so you all know he’s going to get weaned on an Xbox360 and a Wii of his own).

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have liked to have a girl. Actually, I might have preferred it because little girls are infinitely cuter than little boys, but let’s just say (in a very politically incorrect way) that I presume a boy means that I’ll have to worry less when he gets older.

I suspect I am going to regret that statement sooner or later.

Check out the shirt I bought for him at Jinx.com: it's totally awesome!

Next, Obscure 2 was released on PC and Playstation in Europe on the 7th of September. People seem to like it, even though the review scores sometimes are a little bit luke-warm, but I’ve heard that it sells well. It was also a nominee at a french game design festival for best game, and the original designer and creator of Alone in the Dark, Frédérick Raynal, who was also a juror on the panel judging the french entries (can you believe that G.R.A.W.2 won the award? In what way is that game french? Never mind, let's not go into that--I know it is made by Ubisoft, yes.) said that "the game has it's flaws but is strangely compelling and forced me to play it to the end". How cool is that? The boys and girls at hydravision were understandably very proud. Frédérick Raynal is something of a hero to them.

I am currently working on the Wii version of Obscure 2, and brainstorming on what we could for for the DS. Nothing specific to mention though.

The release of the Wii version will coincide with the North American release in Q1 2008. I can already tell you that it will have a lot of extra goodies, and I can definitely say that it is the most extensive and complete version of the game.

The Tyranny of Evil Men

Yesterday I finished Overlord while sitting in my shorts and guzzling cold Jupiler beer. It was excellent. There is something about playing an evil demi-god while drinking beer that makes life good.

So how was the game? I think it was a very favorable experience. I like the Overlord universe, I like the gameplay mechanics. Especially the minion assaults are a lot of fun. You get to fight opponents by commanding your evil critters to surge forward with a gesture of your hand (a maintained directional push on the right stick op de controller and/or a pull from the right trigger), in a way that instantly signifies “this dude is an evil overlord”. It is terrific. Especially if you don’t necessarily hunt the monsters that populate the typical fantasy world Overlord is set in, but if you terrorize hapless villagers and their livestock!

There is nothing like walking into a little town, see people go about their lives merrily, tending cute pumpkin patches, hanging around on town square, tending their little sheep—only to stretch out your hand in that command of woe and watch as your minions tear through the town destroying people, sheep, pumpkins and the interiors of houses as they cackle insanely and villagers run around screaming in terror.

Truth: I have never enjoyed going on a rampage in a video game this much. Each and every moment my little minions present me with gifts and trinkets (bags of money, globs of life force, other items of value) squealing “For you!” or “For the Over-lard!” is memorable and hilarious.

Good stuff: the graphics and gameplay. I don’t understand reviewers who say that this game didn’t look next gen. Are you kidding me? This game kicks the arse of Fable 2 three times over! Every scene, level and area is painstakingly handcrafted and beautifully textured. Normal Maps are used in the 3d graphics but they don’t come to the fore or muddy the visual direction (Oblivion anyone?) at all.

The ending of the game could have been handled differently in my opinion, but then again, I am pretty much averse from endings that feature annoying endboss battles.. You are stripped of your powers and have a final showdown with another entity of evil (which confused me because I couldn’t remember it being mentioned earlier in the game at all) and the whole ending left me feeling a little bit under whelmed (overall though, the experience was the best I had in a long time: it made me forego playing WOW...and as Marianne will attest to, that is something special).

Conclusion: I think Overlord is really cool and Triumph Studios is to be commended on the job they did. Hurrah for dutch game development!

Heart-Eating Game Mechanics and Powerful Script makes for Good Times

So I played The Darkness for the Xbox360 this weekend and I can heartily recommend it. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to like The Darkness so much: I didn't like the comic. Imagine my surprise that it was good: one of the best FPS experiences I've had. The Darkness isn’t really an FPS for me though. It’s more like they decided to use the FPS style as a medium to tell a very cool story. Without the solid script it would have been like F.E.A.R. and without the awesome production values and graphics it would have been bargain bin material.

But the solid script isn’t what sold me on The Darkness. It is the fact that they serve up a gripping experience and they certainly employ all of the genre’s standard trappings to do that, but they went further and used everything at their disposal in the thing. In my mind stands out the last sequence of the game: assault on The Lighthouse (Darkness - Lighthouse - get it?) . It is fucking brilliant in the way it presents a climactic cinematic battle that felt like an evolution of the way FPS games usually serve up this kind of fare. In that regard it has placed itself way above anything that Halo does (for me), and I doubt that it will be surpassed for some time to come.

Most likely I am the only one who sees it that way, because I obsess over storytelling and I was hugely surprised that the FPS genre can serve as a medium for a gripping story-driven experience. I thought that it had become nigh impossible--or the art of understanding it was solely in the hands of Bungie. I was wrong: it is in the hands of Starbreeze, and long may they hold it.

Obscure 2 Submitted to Sony: French People seen Smiling Fondly

This picture was taken just after I burned a copy of my new Celine Dion CD. I’m just kidding, I absolutely hate Celine Dion. In a good sort of way - the type of aversion that doesn’t mean that I want to see her trampled by enraged Pamplonan bulls or shipped off to Guantanamo Bay (per se), but the type of hate that means that I don’t like the sound she produces on the public stage.

Much like I wouldn’t buy a CD with the mating sounds of the bearded vulture, I would not buy a Celine Dion CD. Well maybe I would buy the vulture CD just because I am kind of curious what sound they produce while mating, but I wouldn’t buy a soundtrack of Celine Dion mating because I imagine that it might be worse than her singing.

But I digress friends, of course the picture displayed is the first Gold Master of Obscure 2, the one that is being shipped off to Liverpool where Sony’s QA Rohirrim are going to try and trample it and test whether it is fit to adorn their banner or whether it has distinct orcish qualities.
I am fucking psyched obviously, and so was Francois, the development producer on the project: you can see his wide “thank-the-gods-that-this-isn’t-a-soundtrack-of-Celine-Dion-mating” type smile.

He is a very cool cat and a talented French person: the type of guy that would work at a company like Hydravision, which – as you understand by now – I hold in very high regard.

Submission time...without yielding to an opponent

Tomorrow something exciting is going to happen: I am going to submit Obscure 2 to SCEE QA in Liverpool for the first time. What that means is that Sony is going to test the game and see if it is fit for publication according to their TRC (Technical Requirements Check). I am so psyched! The game right now is in a really good state: everything is in there (graphics, sounds, voices, music) and it is virtually bugfree.

According to one of my colleagues it is really rare that a PS2 game goes through on the first try. Usually you get the disc back and there is stuff you need to fix, then you submit again: rinse and repeat until someone goes postal or the game is actually accepted.

But I have a really good feeling about this. The boys and girls (yes there are girls in game development) of Hydravision have done such a great job on the game, that I am almost tempted to think that we might make it in one go. We'll see.

Tomorrow I'll drive with Gog to Tourcoing, France, with the submission package for Sony; I'll pick up the Master DVD's, and a courier will whisk them away to the angry depths of the Sony QA bastion, where unfinished PS2 games are tormented for all eternity.

Wish me luck! Not only for the fact that Gog is driving (the last time he did that he ruined the first Ark of Noah: yes, there were two), but also that I've managed to jinx myself utterly by writing this post.

Shout out to the talented folks over at RelQ and Enzyme for the testing of build 188. Good job guys!

Girl on Girl action

Nothing special to report, except for this little fact (which, as a gaming nerd I cannot keep from you people): Marianne is kicking me out of the house tonight so she can play God of War 2 with a girlfriend. I mean...aren't there like, thousands of gamers out there who wish they could say "my girfriend is kicking me out of the house tonight so she can play GOW2 with another girl"? How utterly cool is that? Now I only have to figure out what I am going to do tonight...

This one is for Fantasy Nerds

I found a cute little webcomic that is called A Modest Destiny. If you are into RPG's and Fantasy and stuff and like webcomics, I heartily recommend it. It's very funny.

UPDATE: For some reason the link seems to be down at the moment. Maybe it will come up again soon. You could also check out the rest of the site, which is the home of the 300 project. No, it's got nothing to do with muscled guys screaming "Tonight we dine in hell!", it's a game design project.

At the Mountains of Madness...

...there you will find these two creatures. Names: Gog and Magog. Level: ?? Class: None (style neither) Profession: Gog (pictured left) is Lead Tester (known for his ability to make russian games suck less and on the right we have Magog, who is Executive Producer. His powers include, among others, the ability to make little children cry by smiling at them and to growl the word "fuck!" like the eye thingie in Lord of the Rings.

The Annoying Interview

While I was in Germany, I got asked the strangest questions. Most of them revolved around my name and why I was able to understand german but not speak it. In most of the latter cases they would - by way of experiment - try to discover whether it was true. Apparently it was a source of some scepticism - that I would be able to understand them, but not communicate that understanding back to them in their own language.
No, don't worry, I am not going to make geeky software protocol references.
At any rate, the people from geemag.de asked me all kinds of questions about Obscure 2, but promised me that I would be receiving some additional "annoying" queries to spice the article up. Now I am not sure whether the questions below constitute any kind of unpleasant interrogation. Rather than that, I think they are a way for me to be even more vapid and tiresome than I usually am.

For non-german speakers, here's the interview (that was done in english):

Q: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. They are not meant to be taken too seriously. Don’t feel offended. Have fun answering them. Please introduce yourself.
A: My name is Jesse America, I am the Producer for Playlogic on the teenage survival horror title Obscure 2.

Q: In the game we will experience a hangover of one the characters. Please let us know about your personal worst hangover ever (and of course what happened in the night before) and – even more important – what’s the best cure for such a hangover.
A: My worst hangover was after I drank 7 Purple Leprechauns (really, it is a drink) in an irish pub in Calella, Spain. I blacked out and people claimed to have seen me wandering around the town and it’s beaches for 2 consecutive hours – which I can’t remember anymore. The day after was absolute hell. My head felt like part of my brain had been removed with an egg-scrambler, and without an anaesthetic at that. The best cure for that turned out to be a few beers – at 10 ‘o clock in the morning.

Q: There will be some minor drug use in the game and one of the students will experience a bad trip. Please let us know about your worst drug experience so far. And what about the best?
A: My worst drug experience would probably be that while under the influence of something I kissed a girl that looked pretty hot, but in reality – wasn’t. Quite the opposite actually. I actually never had a good drug experience (but mine are limited) and I guess this should be the part
where I say that kids shouldn’t do drugs. Don’t do drugs kids, seriously. It’ll get you killed. Just play Obscure 2 and you’ll see.

Q: Although Obscure 2 will be vanilla flavoured mainstream horror rather than disturbing hardcore horror à la Silent Hill it will scare some people. What are you personally afraid of?
A: Camels. They are terrifying. I am thinking of doing a horror game that features zombie-camels.

Q: Having sex in a teenage horror movie typically leads to death. Lucky us it’s different in real life (if you take the proper precautions). Still it can be a sensible topic – let us know about your most embarrassing sex experience ever. If you don’t want to talk about that you can revive the memories of your first time and share them with us instead.
A: For that I have to go back some 18 years. I vaguely remember a dark alley behind a discotheque, too much beer and a girl I hardly knew that wore the world’s most securely clasped bra. It’s all a big blur because of the alcohol, but what stands out in my mind was her sighing: not of passion or ecstasy, but of utter boredom.

Q: All the main characters in the game are stereotypes of American teenagers and their angst. What kind of teenager were you and do you have good or bad memories about that time? Which?
A: I was a total and utter dork. I played D&D, read and drew comic books and listened to hard rock. So I guess you could say that I was the nerd. My best memories of that time are that I didn’t care I was a nerd: I had fun anyway. The bad times were that I had a friend whose grandma continually sat on my glasses when I was over at his house and destroyed them utterly with her weight.

Q: In the game we will see monsters and supernatural phenomena. Do you believe in these things yourself?
A: Monsters, yes. I absolutely believe in monsters. They are all around us: just open the newspapers and you’ll see them. Serial killers, rapists, dictators, lawyers, CEO’s of big companies... Supernatural phenomena...hmm...I can think of the election of a certain US president that fits that description.

Mad Tram Driver

I can think of a cool new game: it's called Amsterdam Tram Driver. You play a fifty-year old female tram driver in Amsterdam, making her way through the city of sin, drugs and clogs, as she verbally abuses her passengers, scares other tramdrivers into driving too fast, and over-abuses the tram's warning signal.
Really, it would be quite special. It happened to me this morning namely: I was trapped in tram 5 outbound from Amsterdam Central Station, with this total madwoman behind the steering wheel. Well - trams have no steering wheels of course, only a gas pedal and brakes, but she was using the latter one sparingly. Instead, she scared everything and everyone on her path by continuously using the tram's warning sound - which, on a dutch tram, sounds like a hyperactive funeral bell. Also, she verbally assaulted almost everyone daring to enter the tram through the front side passenger entry. It was quite...Burtonesque, if you get what I mean.

Obscure 2 PS2 Demo

Last week we learned from SCEE that the Obscure 2 PS2 Demo would be included in the August edition of Official Playstation Magazine. It passed the first submission round effortlessly! Now, for those of you who aren't in the know about these things, all products released through official Sony channels (which OPSM is), needs to go through a quality check. If the product isn't up to Sony's standards, then they will send it back to you and you will have to fix whatever is wrong with it.

Imagine my surprise that, yesterday, when I went out to buy groceries, I found the Obscure 2 demo attached to the June edition of Dutch version of OPSM! Yay! (see image)

It isn't totally unheard of for a PS2 Demo to pass the first submission round, but it is pretty special. My hat is off to Hydravision, who are such expert developers. Cheers guys!

Now remember people, if you happen to check the demo out: it is still a Work In Progress. It was actually submitted to Sony mid-april, and since then a lot of things have been polished on Obscure 2; graphics, sound, voice-art, gameplay, balance, etc.

Hmmmm...Beer A.K.A. German press tour for Obscure 2

I know all of you share the same kind of discomfort right now, looking at the picture on the right. Or maybe you are day-dreaming, thinking of what I am holding in my hand? Yes friends, that's ein mass, a litre of cold, delicious german beer. Well, to be eaxact, it's not beer, but a noble brew of natural quality that is called Pillsner.

So what has this got to do with Obscure 2 you might ask? Well, it's kind of like this: you come back from a holiday in Crete with girlfriend and kids. You've done nothing but drink beer al day long and sit in the sun. You arrive home and are called by your office: "Your tickets are ready". "What tickets?" you ask, innocently.

"Your airplane tickets to Germany."

"Germany?" You wonder out loud, "I'm not going to Germany am I?"

"Yes you are," the voice on the other side say, "on monday. You are flying from Amsterdam to Hamburg, you will do 25 interviews in 4 days, then you'll fly back from Munich. The PR agent from the german agency will pick you up on the airport. Have fun."

click says the phone.

So that's how I was united, in holy matrimony (if only for a short while - but really hot affairs are usually shortlived anyway) with this 1 litre glass of beer.

And I did some interviews - in case you were starting to wonder - with german gaming magazines and websites about Obscure 2. You know, who have subscriber numbers that make elitist UK gaming rags pale by comparison (not to mention, snobbish dutch ones), like 450.000 for instance. I also did several video interviews, one of which for MTV Germany, who were like, the coolest and nicest gaming press people I have ever met.

Thanks to Ingo Horn from IMC (Interactive Media Consulting), the press tour went very well. Afterwards he called me "the best and most professional producer..." [he had] "...ever been on a presstour with," so I'll return the favor and publicly state (so that I don't have to pay him actual money for that statement about me) that he was the best and most professional PR man I have ever been on a press tour with in Germany. Which has only ever happened to me once in total I must admit, but nevertheless Ingo and his comerades (who were the brains behind the Y-Project by the way) come highly recommended.

In case you were wondering, all of this happened a few weeks back. I actually haven't been touring through Germany and recording voices for Obscure 2 at the same time. I could have if I wanted to (especially after a few more litre glasses of German Pillsner), but I chose not to. When I will reveal my extraordinary powers during the End-Times, I wil pull off much neater tricks than that. Trust me. And I'll be drinking more than ein mass while doing it.

Voice Recording on Obscure 2 wrapped!

Finally, after a few long weeks, the voice recording of Obscure 2 has wrapped. WOOHOO! I want to give a shout out to the cast that did an excellent job on the voices of the teenagers and other characters of the game:

Buster Cox – man of the hour, who kept returning to the studio when we asked, to do more screams, more gurgles, more bit parts; ploughing time after time again through the morning traffic of Miami. Good man and dedicated to the max! He's the real deal: asking me whether he could please do another take to "get it just right"! If you want a good male lead voice for your game: use Buster.

Ayme Sanchez, who – among other parts - did the part of Amy, the stereotypical blond cheerleader (in the game), and who managed to keep her good humor during my directions in spite of my (graphic) descriptions of what was happening to her characters. She also sings in a really cool band! Check her out!

Alicia LaForce for lending a sexy voice to a sexy character in the game (Mei), and being so kind to appeal to my ego by calling me “the easiest director she’d ever worked with”.

The truly remarkable Nikki Rapp, disembodied voice of cuteness (veteran of games like the Sims, Psychonauts and various cartoon shows), who had us all in stitches with her contagious laughing. If you search for it, her laughter is featured prominently early on in Obscure 2: it won’t do justice to the actual experience of sharing a joke with her and then hearing her giggle, but it’s the best next thing! Finally, to all of the other actors who did such a fine job on the game: here’s to a future cooperation!

I also wanted to thank Damon Fries, Liliane Goudriaan, Hans Bakker and Michaël Reijenga of Voice Agency Inter Voice for the sound engineering, the casting and the localization. You guys have been great to work with!

Blog Stress and Updates

Everyone that updates their blog after a very long time usually starts out with “I haven’t updated the site for a while, so I thought I’d write something…”

Well, in all honesty, I haven’t been thinking about this blog at all, and it might have died a normal death, save for the fact that I read an article in a dutch newspaper about “blog stress”.

Have any idea what that is? Apparently it’s got something to do with professional bloggers getting stressed because they have to…you know…blog so often. Well, poor them. It requires therapy to get past this I’m told. Maybe this can help.

I my case, I am not going to make any excuses: the dog ate my homework and I totally forgot about doing updates. But now that I am here and you are here…well, I can spare some time.

As some of you might know, I am one of the original founders of a game development company in The Hague, the Netherlands, called Khaeon Games B.V. The company was established in 1999, and I was CEO, Creative Director and Producer. We did Alpha Black Zero and EuroCops for the PC, and though they weren’t great, they were my first games and I have fond memories of those days. In 2004, together with my (ex) business partners, I founded Spellborn International Ltd., a company that is (currently) developing the Unreal powered online RPG “The Chronicles of Spellborn”, whose setting and main storyline were conceived by me.

I left Khaeon and Spellborn at the end of 2006 – sold all my shares - and am now handling Producer duties on a very cool teenage survival horror game called Obscure 2. It is being developed by Hydravision (who made Obscure 1) and will be coming to the PC, the Playstation 2 and the Nintendo Wii. Especially that last part has got me totally psyched! The game will be released later this year (Q4 2007).

I am also the Producer on an Xbox360 title that is currently under development. I can’t say much about that now, but I will when everything has been officially announced.

Next to that I founded Mystic Box, which you will be hearing more about in due time, I taught two courses in game design which ran for 12 weeks at QANTM (on their frontpage is a video in which you see a few of my students prominently and it has an article about a student of mine Ricardo Makoski doing his own indie game!), - and oh, I'm writing a book!

So that’s what is currently going on in my life. Let’s see if I write anything else this year!