- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Continuing the tradition of showing this month's Game Developer magazine cover alongside next month's contents (since we haven't shipped the April issue yet), you can now see the March 2005 issue, with spooky all-black Silent Hill 4 cover, alongside this post.
However, the April 2005 issue, currently at the printers, has a Star Wars - Knights Of The Old Republic II-themed cover, alongside an interesting, design-detailed postmortem of the game by Obsidian Entertainment. Also debuting is the magazine's annual Salary Survey, written by Managing Editor Jill Duffy, in which we crunch many numbers and work out what video game professionals are actually paid in 2005. Oh, and there's a neat Evan Shamoon authored, multi-interview feature discussing what conventional game creators can learn from MMOs (and vice versa) in terms of digital downloads, price shifting, etc. Also, Electronic Arts is surprisingly honest about developing for the PSP in an interview with a producer at Team Fusion, plus a bunch more smart columns, news items, galleries, and suchlike.
Otherwise, Gamasutra is also going well, some cool features (free reg. req.) are up, including Phil Steinmeyer on development platforms for 'casual games', the reprinted article on unionization from the March issue of Game Developer (this definitely caused a stir), as well as some interesting Question Of The Week and Day In The Life responses and more write-ups from our GDC 2005 coverage. Plus, the news coverage is getting ever-beefier, of course.
Outside of work but on the game front, grabbed a PSP with Lumines (my God, that game is addictive), and also (stop looking at me funny!) picked up Sega Classics Collection, almost entirely for Virtua Racing, which I must have put hundreds of pounds into when I was at university. Oh, and on the non-gaming front, my parents are flying in today, and pottering around the Bay Area until we all fly out to Hawaii next Saturday for a week on 'the big island', which is the live volcano-enabled one, apparently. Should be fun - I'll try to add photos of the trip to the linklog in real-time.
Well, Game Developers Conference 2005, held in San Francisco this year, was pretty much a blast - was great to see old and new friends alike. Those of you who have been checking the linklog may have noticed that, since I work for the organizers (CMP Media), we set up some independent and pretty comprehensive GDC 2005 coverage over at Gamasutra.
In fact, we managed to post around 45 session write-ups, alongside 50 pieces of news, thanks to correspondents including full-time staffers Brandon Sheffield, Jill Duffy, and Quang Hong, plus special guests Nich Maragos, Vincent Diamante, Brad Kane, Eric-Jon Waugh, Daniel Sanchez-Crespo, and Frank Cifaldi. Plenty of highlights, with some stragglers still to be posted this week, but (free reg. req.) John Underkoffler on 'science design' in movies/games, Keita Takahashi on Katamari Damacy, and Ian Bogost on advergaming are some fun starting-points.
Otherwise, I'm now pretty much officially co-chairman of the Independent Games Festival, and I did some press to that effect this year, plus will hopefully be more involved going forward. The IGF went off really well (thanks to co-chair Paul Perreault) this year, and we have lots of plans to make it even better.
Finally, the March 2005 issue of the magazine came out, and the April 2005 issue is going to imaging this week, so I'll post again with the current magazine cover and the contents of the next issue in a coupla days - we have what can only be described as 'more neat stuff' upcoming. In the meantime, back to Season 5 of Angel...