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!

Revelry and Review

Today I turned 33. Happy birthday to me! I've been absent for a few days so I thought that I would pick up where I left off and continue with pictoral exposition of my family life - then decided against it and just uploaded this image instead. This is a scaled version of a painting I did as a present for the wedding of one of my best friends: Barry Hoffman.

Barry and I are involved in making an MMO called "The Chronicles of Spellborn", and have been best friends ever since high school. He recently got married and this painting, which is actually 70 centimeters high, was my present to him. Just like me he is an avid fan of the fantasy genre, and he thinks wizards are cool, (when they're not sporting white beards - with the exception of Sir Ian) so it was a no brainer. Besides, Barry is a highly-skilled marketing genius, so the analogy is strangely fitting - though I've never actually seen Barry entering a meeting with distributors or publishers in that way. Usually it's the other way round.

As my colleagues over at Spellborn will tell you, I am a very lazy artist, so this piece took me a while, but I am satisfied with the end result and Barry was extremely happy with it. His new wife, the alluring Louise Witteman, was very nice and said that he could hang it up in the living room, but somehow I don't see that happening. It would just ruin the feng shui they've got going on in there and I would hate to be the cause of an ill-fated and short-lived marriage. All marriages I know in which the male collaborator put up a fantasy poster in the living room have ended in divorce. I think there is a connection there and a mysterious warning from forces beyond the veil.

Barry said that he wanted the wizard in the painting on his business cards. So if you're in the entertainment industry and someone hands you a card with a wizard on it; you might be in the presence of the illustrious Mr. Hoffman.

Hostel
I saw this movie a few days ago on DVD. Written and Directed by Eli Roth of Cabin Fever fame, this movie has some of the best gore I have seen in a movie in a long time. It is served straight-up, it's not played for laughs, and some of the scenes are quite terrifying. This movie belongs to the Takashi Miike school of ultra violent horror - and the grandmaster has a short cameo in the movie himself.

The first time when I watched it, I was kind of disappointed. I thought that it was just a mediocre movie storywise. The gore was very cool, the nudity in the movie was old-school cheese, (of the type that's supposed to contrast death with life - if you consider naked tits the representative icon for that) a plot element nonetheless, but I didn't understood what the movie was about until it was much too late. Besides that, Marianne gets all wriggly when we're watching a horror movie that's just all about violence and gore (she likes horror movies that are more cerebral and less visual), so then I don't feel comfortable as well. I watched the movie in a somewhat confused state. Marianne said, "This just plain sucked!" when we turned it off, and I kind of agreed with her.

I watched it alone a day later, basically because I noticed that there were four commentary tracks included on the DVD. I have a habit of always listening to these once, (especially with horror movies) even though I don't aspire to be a film maker (someone once told me that only aspiring film makers review the movie with the commentary track on). I just like the anecdotes and humor that good commentary tracks feature, and the insight they provide in the various ways the makers wanted to tell their story, and so on. Watching "Hostel" with commentaries by executive producers Scott Spiegel (Spiderman 2, Evil Dead 1+2) and Quentin Tarrantino and the director himself made the movie much more clearer to me and I actually enjoyed the story more. I took notice of little details I missed earlier and generally enjoyed the passion that Spiegel, Tarrantino and Roth displayed for the horror genre.

If you like your horror movies to be ultra-violent, then this is one to watch.

Abberant Practices - Part 2

The horror continues. I cannot help myself. It's like howling at the moon once you've changed into your were-form: it's practically impossible to resist. Here's more photographs for you.

Marianne's first born is a boy; 8 years old, a computer game addict and little skater wannabe. He has been blessed by as strange a name (for a Dutch boy) as his sister: Diaz Dante Giovanni. I am pretty sure that there is a theory behind this, but I can't remember it at the moment. His heroes are Shadow the Hedgehog (a bad guy from the Sonic computer game series), Kameo (from the computer game of the same name), and the Dark Prince from Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. Currently he is addicted to B-Daman (the most horrible series of toys I have ever laid eyes upon) and the Chronicles of Narnia for the Nintendo GameCube.

Next up are our cats. We have five of them. There used to be six, but the alpha male of the group suddenly decided to leave us and seek a destiny elsewhere. His name was "Kip" and I hope he has found some place where he can be as crazy as he was when he stayed with us. The picture you see here is that of a cat called "Spooky": she is the mother of all of our felines. Getting on in years, "granny" as we lovingly call her, has lost all interest in her children and just wants to be fed on a regular basis and petted whenever she needs attention. There are some wild tales (which I wasn't a witness to) about Spooky. Supposedly she fought and defeated a dog four times her size when the poor animal came too close to her litter; she scared it half to death by jumping on it's back and shredding it's skin and flesh to ribbons. Nowadays however, she's very peaceful.