June swooning, July flying along?

Finally, a return to the main blog, and apologies it's been so long - circumstances and the E3 Expo conspired to prevent updates. Still, to the left is the May 2005 cover for Game Developer, complete with specially commissioned Alien Hominid-related art from the awesome Dan Paladin.

We're just putting the finishing touches on the June-July issue, which is our first annual business issue, and includes an awesome double-developer cover postmortem from Death Jr. creators Backbone Entertainment and Star Wars Episode III adapters The Collective, newly combined as largest U.S. indie developer Foundation 9 Entertainment, and featuring a darn cute Ted Naifeh cover with Death Jr. and friends hanging in a Trump-style boardroom. We also have features on what happens to development studios post-acquisition, on the relative merits of using licensed IP in games, plus the staff's E3 picks (if I told you, I'd have to kill you), and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney as our surreptitiously business-slanted 'A Thousand Words' art feature.

Meanwhile, Gamasutra highlights of late have included Rich Carlson's much-discussed essay on the advantages of making 'short games', a great piece from a Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders senior coder about how you make in-game combat feel visceral, and an interview with the only Western staff member involved in creating Mizuguchi's Rez, plus a plethora of E3 2005 reports from the under-appreciated developer sessions that occurred there.

Outside work - well, have added some really cool CC-licensed content to Legaltorrents, including a full-length feature film called 'Nobody Needs To Know', as well as a Brazilian video game documentary, some great sound samples recorded in a Swedish church, etc - all creator-approved! Also finally managed to sneak out a new release on our netlabel Monotonik. Perhaps, with so many netlabels around nowadays, our output gets a bit lost in the crush - but it's nice to still be releasing good, free music.

Other than that, nice to see everyone at E3 - it looks like I should be heading out to both GDC Europe and the Tokyo Game Show this year, so if you're going to stagger along to either, ping me already. Kirk out.