Yes, it’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left you. But here, here at long last, is your dope beat to step to:

July was a monster, an absolute beast of a month rising out of the ocean like a dozen creepy JJ Abrams trailers stacked on top of each other. Looking back, it feels like all I did was work too late too often and move house a couple of times. Somewhere along the way a message appeared on the white board at work that summed it all up – JULY: THE WEAK WILL BE EATEN. By that point I felt halfway down the throat and more than a little past caring. The game started and stuttered it’s way towards completion, limping along as each day seemed to bring one more thing gone wrong that caused everything else to screech to a halt as we frantically searched for a solution. For a while there I dreamed in murder cases and stylus taps, excel sheets and foreign language text files. The antsy feeling of still sitting at my desk after midnight and watching a status bar slowly fill as a new build loaded to a server on the other side of the country became a way of life.

And then, all of a sudden and without any great fanfare, the game was done. The game was whisked off to spend a couple of weeks being poured over by the people Nintendo hires to make sure your game doesn’t make them look bad and I started to get used to the idea of spending my time fixing the odd thing here and there, poking the internet to make it to do something interesting, and going home on time.

Outside of work, Team Cohabitation is fully moved in to the new place. New furniture has arrived and been assembled (very little of it by me, mind you – for the first or so at Ft. Awesome, I’d leave for work each morning and come home to literally rooms full of new furniture and a new pile of broken down boxes discarded like so much snakeskin. There are worse things than living with an OCD with her own set of tools), pictures and art and things are on the wall, and the internet is actually working the way it’s supposed to. The place is actually the entire second floor of a house that’s been turned into individual apartments, and between the massive amounts of space (much of which has already been filled by books, naturally) and our insatiable lust for new and better gadgets, it’s general regarded by friends and local experts as the best thing ever. I’m tying this from my lovely new desk area in the game room(!), sitting just across from the massive entertainment stand that holds one of the Wiis, the PS2, and the Xbox 360.

Oh, that was the other thing that happened: I got a 360, one of the swanky black Elite models. It was nearly a week before I had time to play it, of course, and even longer before it was properly online, but it was completely worth it. It’s an immediately impressive system – upon taking it out of the box and plugging it in, I was greeted by one of the smoothest and most user friendly interfaces I’ve ever seen on a console (or a PC not running OSX, for that matter). Everything you need to start playing, download demos or full-sized games, get in touch with friends and a dozen other options is right there waiting for you to tell it what to do. There was an article recently written by the lovely and talented Tim Schafer where he described a shift in mentality where the 360 was concerned – when he turned the system on, he wasn’t thinking “I’m going to play game X”, but “I’m going to play some Xbox”. And that’s it exactly. When I sit down with the controller, it’s rarely to play just one game – in addition to Crackdown, Gears of War, or Burnout Revenge, I might also check for new demos or Xbox Live Arcade games to try out, play a few hands of Uno online with strangers around the world, or head over to the multimedia section to salivate over the Bioshock trailer for the thousandth time. It’s a genuine home entertainment center, and a genuine accomplishment in the realm of game consoles. How Microsoft got their shit together long enough to produce it is more than a little beyond me.

And what else? With work calming down I’ve got some headspace to devote to game design again (funny how I feel like I’ve said that exact thing in this space before), specifically games built around actual every day moments. The thing I’m currently taking notes for in preparation for writing a proper game design document comes from two slightly different sources: a quote from Hideo Kojima in an old issue of Wired where he talked about looking at the different functions of a building as a study in game design, and my old, old, old habit of making games out of dumb stuff to keep myself entertained. The final product should be short and sweet; a flash game, but probably not deep enough to warrant anything bigger. As it moves from notes into actual, semi-firm plans, I’ll probably talk about it more here.

In the meantime, things continue apace. More coming sooner rather than later about rock shows, fallen trees, games, and the usual stuff.

Filed under: Games, Wreck your life