May 31, 2006

Webby Madness, Magazine Mash-Ups

webby.jpg Well, apologies for the delay again, but wow, a combination of E3, some post-E3 Game Developer magazine deadlines, and the constant updates needed for my twin kiddies, Gamasutra and GameSetWatch (as well as close fraternal cousins Serious Games Source and the soon-to-relaunch IGF website - oh, and having a real family life too!) has meant, well... watching music videos on my Akimbo and drinking an oddly banana-flavored beer is finally giving me time to get up to date.

But what's that weird springy thing pictured, you might say? Well, delightfully, Gamasutra won the Best Game-Related Website Webby for 2006, even beating out much bigger sites like GameSpot and GameSpy - a BIG surprise for us - and so I'm off to New York in about 10 days to deliver a 'witty' 5-word acceptance speech at the Webby Awards Ceremony.

Stealing the last paragraph of my news story on it: "The Gamasutra editors (editorial director Simon Carless, features editor Quang Hong, assistant editor Frank Cifaldi) and website executive producer Peter Leahy would like to thank all contributors to the website, as well as all readers, for helping us continue to provide quality editorial and definitive information for professionals in the game industry." We put a hell of a lot of work into Gama, so we appreciate it that the Webby judges dug the blend of up to date news and in-depth features we sink into the site nowadays. Also, I'll try (and probably fail) to take pictures of Prince and Gorillaz at the awards and dump 'em on my Flickr account.

Oh, and the June/July 2006 issue of Game Developer is about to ship, but I completely skipped describing the May 2006 issue, which has a postmortem of Konami's Metal Gear Acid 2 on the cover (written by game director Shinta Nojira at Kojima Productions!), and other goodness like an article on Final Fantasy XI's patching system, plus an interview with Gears Of War's Cliff Bleszinski, and a whole bunch of neeto technical articles - click through for more.

Otherwise, it's biz as usual - the linklog is a little denuded, but that's down to GameSetWatch blasting off, and other fun stuff like Monotonik (here's a .torrent of all our 2006 releases so far!), grabbing an MST3K DVD collection or two to watch with Holly, digging the new-to-U.S. World Party album a lot, and, oh, actually playing video games very occasionally (latest object of grinning interest - Rockstar Presents Table Tennis!) Until next time...

Posted by h0l211 at 09:29 PM