Wired Raves, Game Developer Stuff, Media Shenanigans..

So, I did have some more books/games/DVDs to mini-review, but I'm feeling a bit typed out, so I'll do some micro-reviews a little later in this post, I guess.

In the meantime, let's see what's happened recently. Rather marvellously, the Hacks series from O'Reilly (of which my book is one of, uhh, about twenty!) was nominated for a Wired Rave Award. So that's neat. Also, we just sent the February 2005 issue of Game Developer magazine to the printers, and it includes the previously-mentioned Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal postmortem, plus a very interesting article on women and gaming, and a preview of Game Developers Conference written by me, with recommendations for neat lectures/roundtables by the rest of the edit team (Brandon, Jill, Quang.)

On the web side of things, Gamasutra is still going really well, plus, we're in the beginning stages of resurrecting a cool, now 'freestuff'-related game download site as a spare-time project - maybe we'll have something to show in a couple of months. Or not.

Ah, yes, so those micro-reviews. Things wot I have been enjoying include DVDs (the Region 2-only Big Train, genius surreal sketch comedy from the Father Ted creators, including Spaced's Simon Pegg and Mark Heap), books (Everyone In Silico by Jim Munroe - a futurist, anti-ad, borderline cyberpunk, immensely entertaining romp), and games (Alien Hominid - an IGF finalist, and a gorgeously playable Metal Slug-styled side-scrolling delight.)

New year, new job, good vibes?

Wow, it's a New Year already. We just hung out in downtown San Jose with some friends for NYE, which was very agreeable (and very walkable from the house, more to the point!), so now we're just chilling out and waiting for the resumption of work festivities.

Speaking of which, my day job has now shifted up a gear, and as of January 1st 2005, I'm now the Editor of both Game Developer magazine, the print publication which goes out to around 35,000 professional game developers, and Gamasutra.com, the sister website, which itself has about 220,000 registered members. We already have some outstandingly great staff and contributors on the magazine and the site, and it's going to be fun to further editorial integration and kick things up a notch (ack, an Emeril-ism!) in 2005. Oh, and talking of the magazine, check out the December 2004 Game Developer cover, masterminded by ex-editor Alex Handy, for some awesome custom Katamari Damacy art (and corresponding postmortem) - forthcoming issues will feature neato postmortems for The Sims 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal.

Oh, and it would be remiss of me not to mention science fiction author and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow's rather startling review of 'Gaming Hacks', my O'Reilly practical game hacking tome. "I can't remember when I've had more engrossing fun with a technical book... the perfect mix of informative, enjoyable and fascinating."? Wow, that means a lot to me that someone, someone notable, even, digs the book, and digs it so eloquently.