Alexx's Journal

Someone in our office likes St. Patrick's Day:

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The nominations for the Spike TV Video Game Awards are out, and BioShock is nominated in every category that we are eligible for*. I am especially pleased at the nomination under Studio of the Year for "Irrational Games". Winning that would be a sweet farewell to the now-defunct brand name.

* I am reminded of the year that Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich came out. One of the PC gaming magazines had an editor who really loved it, and was upset that it didn't win in any of the categories. So he insisted that it be listed as an Honorable Mention in *every* category. Including completely inappropriate ones like Sports Game and Racing Game :-)

BioShock Lego made by small children.

A Red vs Blue comic.

You know you've hit the mainstream when: your game gets discussed on a message forum devoted to the Denver Broncos.

Thanks to freerange_snark, who reports that at a recent party, she told everyone there to buy BioShock -- only to discover that everyone who had a relevant machine either had already done so, or was just waiting for their next paycheck :-)

... but in a good way :-)

Valve bans Bioshock from the office.

"We had to ban Bioshock from our offices," Valve boss Gabe Newell told us. "Nobody gets to play it until Orange Box is done - that's our reward to ourselves as a company; everyone gets a copy of Bioshock."

For those who don't know, Valve are the makers of Half Life 2, which was the *last* game widely hailed as "best ever", and one that many (though not all) reviewers say that BioShock has surpassed.

Gamasutra.com lists the top game sales through Amazon each week. For the week of August 23rd, BioShock is #1 Xbox 360 game in North America, beating Madden NFL '08, and also the #1 PC game. In the UK, the BioShock *Limited Edition* was the top seller for both 360 and PC, with the normal version coming in at #2 for each platform.

More mainstream coverage:
A news article from Reuters: "Take-Two stock jumped 10 percent on Tuesday when "BioShock" was released as glowing reviews poured in and the game topped sales charts at retailers like Amazon.com."

An article in Esquire, "Video Games (Finally) Grow Up", which spends about half the column inches talking about BioShock.

A nice writeup in The Boston Globe.

And finally, a marvelously silly video from G4: Big Daddy Day Care :-)

Sunday: Took myself and some strawberries over to jducouer's place for gaming. The strawberries were gone well before the end of the day :)

Played a bunch of games, won some. Most interesting new game was definitely Khet. It's a vaguely egyptian-themed chesslike game -- with real lasers! How, you might ask, do lasers work with chess? Pretty simply. Most of the pieces contain one or more angled mirrors. After every move, you push the button on your side to fire the laser, and any piece that gets hit by it (on a non-mirrored side) is captured. It's entirely possible to capture your own pieces if you're not careful :) Now my ambitious side wants to create a game that's a combination of this and RoboRally :)

Other games I played were Formula De, Octiles (very elegant, if crowded with four players), and Betrayal at House on the Hill (the treacherous learnedax was defeated, but not before killing me). At the end of the evening, J said I should come over and game more often, which sounds good to me.

Monday: It rained all night and into the morning, so no harvest :(

Teusday: Harvest was a scant pint of strawberries. Thanks to the rain, the rot/ripe ratio has gone over one.

I did get to say hi to our garden snake, who was out sunning himself. This was the first time I've seen him this year, though I did see his freshly-shed skin a few days ago. He's about a foot long. He pretended not to see me, but there was a ripe strawberry near his head, so I did eventually have to spook him. I wonder if he eats strawberries himself, or if he just eats things that eat strawberries?

Speaking of the local ecosystem, I think we have a problem with our strawberry density. Some areas of the garden are quite sparse, and I think those sections just end up functioning as bird feeders. Certainly, *I'm* not getting any ripe fruit from that section before it gets little beak-haped holes pecked in it. And it seems that there are more birds this year than last. I think that we (and by "we", I mean Sue the Gardener) ought to consolidate those strawberries into thicker patches, or, in cases where the soil won't support thick patches, replace with something else. I think that these sparse patches are just reducing our total take.

(Of course, I'm the one most affected, since even in a poor harvest year, we take in far more than the household can eat without throwing a party. I typically bring the rest into work with me, so it helps my job security :)

Got a call today from the folks at PCs For Everyone to arrange a pickup for my dead PC -- I think. The person on the phone had a sufficiently thick accent that I'm honestly not sure, having caught aboutone word in three or four.

Wednesday: A mere 25. I do not like this trend.

My PC did get picked up while I was at work, so that's good.

The publicity wave for BioShock is starting to hit, and hit big. So far, we're a huge critical success. Here's hoping that commercial success follows in August...

Thursday: Slept very poorly and called in sick. Didn't even have the energy to hit the garden.

Spent most of the day gaming. Lego Star Wars II is now at something like 91% complete. Also have been playing Geneforge 4, the latest old-school RPG from Spiderweb Software. The interface remains barely tolerable, but the fundamental gameplay is rock solid, and the scenario is as fascinating and multi-factioned as ever.

Friday: Harvest was about a pint.

There is a local squirrel that kestrell used to refer to as God of the Trash Cans. Since Meredith got new cans with lids, he has been locked out of his traditional domain with frustration. This morning, I saw him making a run for the strawberries, but I scared him off. For the moment, anyways.

Yesterday, I spent a little time doing voice recording at work. I appear to be typecast -- once again, I am playing an insane killer on Deck 4. On the down side, this time I don't get to be the *primary* insane killer, just one of his flunkies. On the up side, the player gets to interact with, and eventually even kill me. I made sure to put the screams and death gurgles near the end of the recording session, so I'd keep my voice for the parts with words.

Today, indirectly due to the voice recording, Ken walked in and asked me "How do you pronounce 'apis'". After some googling, I discovered that it has a short 'a' if you're talking about bees, a long one if you're talking about Sumerian bull gods. I think I will leave it as a mystery which one was relevant :) It took a little while to find though; Google kept trying to talk to me about Application Programming Interfaces...

This weekend, I did some homework, which involved taking home the loaner Xbox360, a pile of shooter titles, and evaluating the ways in which they train players. What follows should not be considered comprehensive reviews of the game as a whole, though I did write down my early impressions.

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In payment for my sins in helping horribly break the Tommy-and-Rebecca-flee-to-a-shuttle scene so many times, I am now tasked with implementing a scene about 3-4 times as complicated. It will be extremely cool when it's done, but there's no way I'm going to get it QA-proof by Alpha.

Alpha, by the way, is a week from today, which is why I'm at work instead of home eating leftovers. Still, I remain Thank-ful that I have such a cool job.

Tomorrow I depart on my first-ever bonafide Business Trip, to the Electronic Entertainment Expo. I'll be researching a variety of competing games, taking the pulse of the industry, and see how Bioshock is holding up in relation to everyone else. It's mostly a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but I am strangely excited nonetheless. I'll be back late Saturday, and probably blogging about what I saw early next week. I *might* blog from the show, depending on how logistics/wireless/energy work out...